THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 
OF  CALIFORNIA 

LOS  ANGELES 


Essays  in  London 


Elsewhere 


BY 

HENRY    JAMES 


NEW   YORK 
HARPER    &    BROTHERS    PUBLISHERS 

1893 


Copyright,  1893,  by  HARPER  &  BROTHERS. 


All  rights  resented. 


College 
Library 

?s 


NOTE 

THE  first  of  these  Papers  was  written  with  a  cer 
tain  reference  to  the  admirable  illustrations,  by  Mr. 
Pennell,  with  which  on  its  original  appearance  in 
The  Century  it  was  accompanied.  When  the  notice 
of  Pierre  Loti  and  that  of  MM.  de  Goncourt  were 
first  published  (in  The  Fortnightly  Review)  the  latest 
volumes  of  these  authors  had  not  appeared. 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

^  LONDON  i 

JAMES  RUSSELL  LOWELL 44 

FRANCES  ANNE  KEMBLE 81 

•S/CUSTAVE  FLAUBERT 121 

PIERRE  LOTI 151 

THE  JOURNAL  OF  THE  BROTHERS  DE  GONCOURT  .  186 
BROWNING  IN  WESTMINSTER  ABBEY  ....  222 

HENRIK  IBSEN 230 

MRS.  HUMPHRY  WARD 253 

V'CRITICISM 259 

AN  ANIMATED  CONVERSATION 267 


LONDON 


I 

THERE  is  a  certain  evening  that  I  count  as  virtually 
a  first  impression — the  end  of  a  wet,  black  Sunday, 
twenty  years  ago,  about  the  first  of  March.  There 
had  been  an  earlier  vision,  but  it  had  turned  gray, 
like  faded  ink,  and  the  occasion  I  speak  of  was  a 
fresh  beginning.  No  doubt  I  had  a  mystic  presci 
ence  of  how  fond  of  the  murky  modern  Babylon  I  was 
one  day  to  become ;  certain  it  is  that  as  I  look  back 
I  find  every  small  circumstance  of  those  hours  of  ap 
proach  and  arrival  still  as  vivid  as  if  the  solemnity 
of  an  opening  era  had  breathed  upon  it.  The  sense 
of  approach  was  already  almost  intolerably  strong  at 
Liverpool,  where,  as  I  remember,  the  perception  of 
the  English  character  of  everything  was  as  acute  as 
a  surprise,  though  it  could  only  be  a  surprise  without 
a  shock.  It  was  expectation  exquisitely  gratified, 
superabundantly  confirmed.  There  was  a  kind  of 
wonder,  indeed,  that  England  should  be  as  English 
as,  for  my  entertainment,  she  took  the  trouble  to  be ; 
but  the  wonder  would  have  been  greater,  and  all  the 
pleasure  absent,  if  the  sensation  had  not  been  violent. 
It  seems  to  sit  there  again  like  a  visiting  presence,  as 
i 


2  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON    AND    ELSEWHERE 

it  sat  opposite  to  me  at  breakfast  at  a  small  table  in 
a  window  of  the  old  coffee-room  of  the  Adelphi  Hotel 
—the  unextended  (as  it  then  was),  the  unimproved, 
the  unblushingly  local  Adelphi.  Liverpool  is  not  a 
romantic  city,  but  that  smoky  Saturday  returns  to  me 
as  a  supreme  success,  measured  by  its  association 
with  the  kind  of  emotion  in  the  hope  of  which,  for 
the  most  part,  we  betake  ourselves  to  far  countries. 

It  assumed  this  character  at  an  early  hour  —  or 
rather,  indeed,  twenty -four  hours  before — with  the 
sight,  as  one  looked  across  the  wintry  ocean,  of  the 
strange,  dark,  lonely  freshness  of  the  coast  of  Ire 
land.  Better  still,  before  we  could  come  up  to  the 
city,  were  the  black  steamers  knocking  about  in  the 
yellow  Mersey,  under  a  sky  so  low  that  they  seemed 
to  touch  it  with  their  funnels,  and  in  the  thickest, 
windiest  light.  Spring  was  already  in  the  air,  in  the 
town ;  there  was  no  rain,  but  there  was  still  less  sun 
— one  wondered  what  had  become,  on  this  side  of  the 
world,  of  the  big  white  splotch  in  the  heavens ;  and 
the  gray  mildness,  shading  away  into  black  at  every 
pretext,  appeared  in  itself  a  promise.  This  was  how 
it  hung  about  me,  between  the  window  and  the  fire, 
in  the  coffee-room  of  the  hotel — late  in  the  morning 
for  breakfast,  as  we  had  been  long  disembarking.  The 
other  passengers  had  dispersed,  knowingly  catching 
trains  for  London  (we  had  only  been  a  handful) ;  I 
had  the  place  to  myself,  and  I  felt  as  if  I  had  an  ex 
clusive  property  in  the  impression.  I  prolonged  it,  I 
sacrificed  to  it,  and  it  is  perfectly  recoverable  now, 
with  the  very  taste  of  the  national  muffin,  the  creak 


LONDON  3 

of  the  waiter's  shoes  as  he  came  and  went  (could 
anything  be  so  English  as  his  intensely  professional 
back  ?  it  revealed  a  country  of  tradition),  and  the 
rustle  of  the  newspaper  I  was  too  excited  to  read. 

I  continued  to  sacrifice  for  the  rest  of  the  day; 
it  didn't  seem  to  me  a  sentient  thing,  as  yet,  to  in 
quire  into  the  means  of  getting  away.  My  curiosity 
must  indeed  have  languished,  for  I  found  myself  on 
the  morrow  in  the  slowest  of  Sunday  trains,  pottering 
up  to  London  with  an  interruptedness  which  might 
have  been  tedious  without  the  conversation  of  an  old 
gentleman  who  shared  the  carriage  with  me  and  to 
whom  my  alien  as  well  as  comparatively  youthful 
character  had  betrayed  itself.  He  instructed  me  as 
to  the  sights  of  London,  and  impressed  upon  me 
that  nothing  was  more  worthy  of  my  attention  than 
the  great  cathedral  of  St.  Paul.  "  Have  you  seen  St. 
Peter's  in  Rome  ?  St.  Peter's  is  more  highly  embel 
lished,  you  know ;  but  you  may  depend  upon  it  that 
St.  Paul's  is  the  better  building  of  the  two."  The 
impression  I  began  with  speaking  of  was,  strictly, 
that  of  the  drive  from  Euston,  after  dark,  to  Morley's 
Hotel  in  Trafalgar  Square.  It  was  not  lovely — it 
was  in  fact  rather  horrible ;  but  as  I  move  again 
through  dusky,  tortuous  miles,  in  the  greasy  four- 
wheeler  to  which  my  luggage  had  compelled  me  to 
commit  myself,  I  recognize  the  first  step  in  an  initia 
tion  of  which  the  subsequent  stages  were  to  abound 
in  pleasant  things.  It  is  a  kind  of  humiliation  in  a 
great  city  not  to  know  where  you  are  going,  and  Mor 
ley's  Hotel  was  then,  to  my  imagination,  only  a  vague 


4  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

ruddy  spot  in  the  general  immensity.  The  immensity 
was  the  great  fact,  and  that  was  a  charm ;  the  miles 
of  housetops  and  viaducts,  the  complication  of  junc 
tions  and  signals  through  which  the  train  made  its 
way  to  the  station  had  already  given  me  the  scale. 
The  weather  had  turned  to  wet,  and  we  went  deeper 
and  deeper  into  the  Sunday  night  The  sheep  in 
the  fields,  on  the  way  from  Liverpool,  had  shown  in 
their  demeanor  a  certain  consciousness  of  the  day ; 
but  this  momentous  cab-drive  was  an  introduction  to 
rigidities  of  custom.  The  low  black  houses  were  as 
inanimate  as  so  many  rows  of  coal-scuttles,  save 
where  at  frequent  corners,  from  a  gin-shop,  there 
was  a  flare  of  light  more  brutal  still  than  the  dark 
ness.  The  custom  of  gin  —  that  was  equally  rigid, 
and  in  this  first  impression  the  public-houses  counted 
for  much. 

Morley's  Hotel  proved  indeed  to  be  a  ruddy  spot ; 
brilliant,  in  my  recollection,  is  the  coffee-room  fire, 
the  hospitable  mahogany,  the  sense  that  in  the 
stupendous  city  this,  at  any  rate  for  the  hour,  was  a 
shelter  and  a  point  of  view.  My  remembrance  of 
the  rest  of  the  evening — I  was  probably  very  tired — 
is  mainly  a  remembrance  of  a  vast  four-poster.  My 
little  bedroom  candle,  set  in  its  deep  basin,  caused 
this  monument  to  project  a  huge  shadow  and  to 
make  me  think,  I  scarce  knew  why,  of  "The  Ingolds- 
by  Legends."  If  at  a  tolerably  early  hour  the  next 
day  I  found  myself  approaching  St.  Paul's,  it  was 
not  wholly  in  obedience  to  the  old  gentleman  in  the 
railway-carriage:  I  had  an  errand  in  the  City,  and 


LONDON  5 

the  City  was  doubtless  prodigious.  But  what  I 
mainly  recall  is  the  romantic  consciousness  of  pass 
ing  under  Temple  Bar  and  the  way  two  lines  of 
"Henry  Esmond"  repeated  themselves  in  my  mind  as 
I  drew  near  the  masterpiece  of  Sir  Christopher  Wren. 
"  The  stout,  red-faced  woman  "  whom  Esmond  had 
seen  tearing  after  the  stag-hounds  over  the  slopes  at 
Windsor  was  not  a  bit  like  the  effigy  "  which  turns 
its  stony  back  upon  St.  Paul's  and  faces  the  coaches 
struggling  up  Ludgate  Hill."  As  I  looked  at  Queen 
Anne  over  the  apron  of  my  hansom — she  struck  me 
as  very  small  and  dirty,  and  the  vehicle  ascended 
the  mild  incline  without  an  effort — it  was  a  thrilling 
thought  that  the  statue  had  been  familiar  to  the  hero 
of  the  incomparable  novel.  All  history  appeared  to 
live  again,  and  the  continuity  of  things  to  vibrate 
through  my  mind. 

To  this  hour,  as  I  pass  along  the  Strand,  I  take 
again  the  walk  I  took  there  that  afternoon.  I  love 
the  place  to-day,  and  that  was  the  commencement 
of  my  passion.  It  appeared  to  me  to  present  phe 
nomena  and  to  contain  objects  of  every  kind,  of  an 
inexhaustible  interest ;  in  particular  it  struck  me  as 
desirable  and  even  indispensable  that  I  should  pur 
chase  most  of  the  articles  in  most  of  the  shops.  My 
eyes  rest  with  a  certain  tenderness  on  the  places 
where  I  resisted  and  on  those  where  I  succumbed. 
The  fragrance  of  Mr.  Rimmel's  establishment  is  again 
in  my  nostrils  ;  I  see  the  slim  young  lady  (I  hear 
her  pronunciation)  who  waited  upon  me  there.  Sa 
cred  to  me  to-day  is  the  particular  aroma  of  the 


6  ESSAYS   IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

hair-wash  that  I  bought  of  her.  I  pause  before  the 
granite  portico  of  Exeter  Hall  (it  was  unexpectedly 
narrow  and  wedge-like),  and  it  evokes  a  cloud  of 
associations  which  are  none  the  less  impressive  be 
cause  they  are  vague ;  coming  from  I  don't  know 
where — from  Punch,  from  Thackeray,  from  old  vol 
umes  of  the  Illustrated  London  News  turned  over 
in  childhood  ;  seeming  connected  with  Mrs.  Beecher 
Stowe  and  "  Uncle  Tom's  Cabin."  Memorable  is  a 
rush  I  made  into  a  glover's  at  Charing  Cross — the 
one  you  pass  going  eastward,  just  before  you  turn 
into  the  station  ;  that,  however,  now  that  I  thinlc  of 
it,  must  have  been  in  the  morning,  as  soon  as  I 
issued  from  the  hotel.  Keen  within  me  was  a  sense 
of  the  importance  of  deflowering,  of  despoiling  the 
shop. 

A  day  or  two  later,  in  the  afternoon,  I  found 
myself  staring  at  my  fire,  in  a  lodging  of  which  I 
had  taken  possession  on  foreseeing  that  I  should 
spend  some  weeks  in  London.  I  had  just  come  in, 
and,  having  attended  to  the  distribution  of  my  lug 
gage,  sat.  down  to  consider  my  habitation.  It  was 
on  the  ground  floor,  and  the  fading  daylight  reached 
it  in  a  sadly  damaged  condition.  It  struck  me  as 
stuffy  and  unsocial,  with  its  mouldy  smell  and  its 
decoration  of  lithographs  and  wax-flowers — an  im 
personal  black  hole  in  the  huge  general  blackness. 
The  uproar  of  Piccadilly  hummed  away  at  the  end 
of  the  street,  and  the  rattle  of  a  heartless  hansom 
passed  close  to  my  ears.  A  sudden  horror  of  the 
whole  place  came  over  me,  like  a  tiger-pounce  of 


LONDON  7 

homesickness  which  had  been  watching  its  moment. 
London  was  hideous,  vicious,  cruel,  and  above  all 
overwhelming ;  whether  or  no  she  was  "  careful  of 
the  type,"  she  was  as  indifferent  as  Nature  herself  to 
the  single  life.  In  the  course  of  an  hour  I  should 
have  to  go  out  to  my  dinner,  which  was  not  supplied 
on  the  premises,  and  that  effort  assumed  the  form  of 
a  desperate  and  dangerous  quest.  It  appeared  to  me 
that  I  would  rather  remain  dinnerless,  would  rather 
even  starve,  than  sally  forth  into  the  infernal  town, 
where  the  natural  fate  of  an  obscure  stranger  would 
be  to  be  trampled  to  death  in  Piccadilly  and  his  car 
cass  thrown  into  the  Thames.  I  did  not  starve, 
however,  and  I  eventually  attached  myself  by  a 
hundred  human  links  to  the  dreadful,  delightful 
city.  That  momentary  vision  of  its  smeared  face 
and  stony  heart  has  remained  memorable  to  me,  but 
I  am  happy  to  say  that  I  can  easily  summon  up 
others. 

II 

It  is,  no  doubt,  not  the  taste  of  every  one,  but  for 
the  real  London-lover  the  mere  immensity  of  the 
place  is  a  large  part  of  its  merit.  A  small  London 
would  be  an  abomination,  as  it  fortunately  is  an  im 
possibility,  for  the  idea  and  the  name  are  beyond 
everything  an  expression  of  extent  and  number. 
Practically,  of  course,  one  lives  in  a  quarter,  in  a 
plot ;  but  in  imagination  and  by  a  constant  mental 
act  of  reference  the  sympathizing  resident  inhabits 
the  whole — and  it  is  only  of  him  that  I  deem  it  worth 
while  to  speak.  He  fancies  himself,  as  they  say,  for 


8  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

being  a  particle  in  so  unequalled  an  aggregation ; 
and  its  immeasurable  circumference,  even  though  un- 
visited  and  lost  in  smoke,  gives  him  the  sense  of  a 
social,  an  intellectual  margin.  There  is  a  luxury  in 
the  knowledge  that  he  may  come  and  go  without 
being  noticed,  even  when  his  comings  and  goings 
have  no  nefarious  end.  I  don't  mean  by  this  that 
the  tongue  of  London  is  not  a  very  active  member ; 
the  tongue  of  London  would  indeed  be  worthy  of  a 
chapter  by  itself.  But  the  eyes  which  at  least  in 
some  measure  feed  its  activity  are  fortunately  for  the 
common  advantage  solicited  at  any  moment  by  a 
thouasnd  different  objects.  If  the  place  is  big,  every 
thing  it  contains  is  certainly  not  so  ;  but  this  may 
at  least  be  said,  that  if  small  questions  play  a  part 
there,  they  play  it  without  illusions  about  its  impor 
tance.  There  are  too  many  questions,  small  or  great; 
and  each  day,  as  it  arrives,  leads  its  children,  like  a 
kind  of  mendicant  mother,  by  the  hand.  Therefore 
perhaps  the  most  general  characteristic  is  the  ab 
sence  of  insistence.  Habits  and  inclinations  flourish 
and  fall,  but  intensity  is  never  one  of  them.  The 
spirit  of  the  great  city  is  not  analytic,  and,  as  they 
come  up,  subjects  rarely  receive  at  its  hands  a  treat 
ment  offensively  earnest  or  indiscreetly  thorough. 
There  are  not  many — of  those  of  which  London  dis 
poses  with  the  assurance  begotten  of  its  large  ex 
perience —  that  wouldn't  lend  themselves  to  a  ten 
derer  manipulation  elsewhere.  It  takes  a  very  great 
affair,  a  turn  of  the  Irish  screw  or  a  divorce  case 
lasting  many  days,  to  be  fully  threshed  out.  The 


LONDON  9 

mind  of  Mayfair,  when  it  aspires  to  show  what  it 
really  can  do,  lives  in  the  hope  of  a  new  divorce  case, 
and  an  indulgent  providence  —  London  is  positively 
in  certain  ways  the  spoiled  child  of  the  world — abun 
dantly  recognizes  this  particular  aptitude  and  hu 
mors  the  whim. 

The  compensation  is  that  material  does  arise ;  that 
there  is  great  variety,  if  not  morbid  subtlety;  and 
that  the  whole  of  the  procession  of  events  and  topics 
passes  across  your  stage.  For  the  moment  I  am 
speaking  of  the  inspiration  there  may  be  in  the  sense 
of  far  frontiers ;  the  London-lover  loses  himself  in 
this  swelling  consciousness,  delights  in  the  idea  that 
the  town  which  encloses  him  is  after  all  only  a  paved 
country,  a  state  by  itself.  This  is  his  condition  of 
mind  quite  as  much  if  he  be  an  adoptive  as  if  he 
be  a  matter-of-course  son.  I  am  by  no  means  sure 
even  that  he  need  be  of  Anglo-Saxon  race  and  have 
inherited  the  birthright  of  English  speech ;  though, 
on  the  other  hand,  I  make  no  doubt  that  these  ad 
vantages  minister  greatly  to  closeness  of  allegiance. 
The  great  city  spreads  her  dusky  mantle  over  in 
numerable  races  and  creeds,  and  I  believe  there  is 
scarcely  a  known  form  of  worship  that  has  not  some 
temple  there  (have  I  not  attended  at  the  Church  of 
Humanity,  in  Lamb's  Conduit,  in  company  with  an 
American  lady,  a  vague  old  gentleman,  and  several 
seamstresses  ?),  or  any  communion  of  men  that  has 
not  some  club  or  guild.  London  is  indeed  an  epit 
ome  of  the  round  world,  and  just  as  it  is  a  common 
place  to  say  that  there  is  nothing  one  can't  "get" 


10  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON    AND    ELSEWHERE 

there,  so  it  is  equally  true  that  there  is  nothing  one 
can't  study  at  first  hand. 

One  doesn't  test  these  truths  every  day,  but  they 
form  part  of  the  air  one  breathes  (and  welcome,  says 
the  London-hater — for  there  is  such  a  benighted  ani 
mal—to  the  pestilent  compound).  They  color  the 
thick,  dim  distances  which  in  my  opinion  are  the 
most  romantic  town-vistas  in  the  world  ;  they  min 
gle  with  the  troubled  light  to  which  the  straight,  un- 
garnished  aperture  in  one's  dull,  undistinctive  house- 
front  affords  a  passage  and  which  makes  an  interior 
of  friendly  corners,  mysterious  tones,  and  unbetrayed 
ingenuities,  as  well  as  with  the  low,  magnificent  me 
dium  of  the  sky,  where  the  smoke  and  the  fog  and 
the  weather  in  general,  the  strangely  undefined  hour 
of  the  day  and  season  of  the  year,  the  emanations 
of  industries  and  the  reflection  of  furnaces,  the  red 
gleams  and  blurs  that  may  or  may  not  be  of  sunset — 
as  you  never  see  any  source  of  radiance  you  can't 
in  the  least  tell  —  all  hang  together  in  a  confusion, 
a  complication,  a  shifting  but  irremovable  canopy. 
They  form  the  undertone  of  the  deep,  perpetual  voice 
of  the  place.  One  remembers  them  when  one's  loy 
alty  is  on  the  defensive ;  when  it  is  a  question  of  in 
troducing  as  many  striking  features  as  possible  into 
the  list  of  fine  reasons  one  has  sometimes  to  draw  up, 
that  eloquent  catalogue  with  which  one  confronts  the 
hostile  indictment — the  array  of  other  reasons  which 
may  easily  be  as  long  as  one's  arm.  According  to 
these  other  reasons,  it  plausibly  and  conclusively 
stands  that,  as  a  place  to  be  happy  in,  London  will 


LONDON  1 1 

never  do.  I  don't  say  it  is  necessary  to  meet  so  ab 
surd  an  allegation  except  for  one's  personal  compla 
cency.  If  indifference,  in  so  gorged  an  organism,  is 
still  livelier  than  curiosity,  you  may  avail  yourself  of 
your  own  share  in  it  simply  to  feel  that  since  such 
and  such  a  person  doesn't  care  for  real  greatness,  so 
much  the  worse  for  such  and  such  a  person.  But 
once  in  a  while  the  best  believer  recognizes  the  im 
pulse  to  set  his  religion  in  order,  to  sweep  the  temple 
of  his  thoughts  and  trim  the  sacred  lamp.  It  is  at 
such  hours  as  this  that  he  reflects  with  elation  that 
the  British  capital  is  the  particular  spot  in  the  world 
which  communicates  the  greatest  sense  of  life. 

Ill 

The  reader  will  perceive  that  I  do  not  shrink  even 
from  the  extreme  concession  of  speaking  of  our  capi 
tal  as  British,  and  this  in  a  shameless  connection  with 
the  question  of  loyalty  on  the  part  of  an  adoptive 
son.  For  I  hasten  to  explain  that  if  half  the  source 
of  one's  interest  in  it  comes  from  feeling  that  it  is  the 
property  and  even  the  home  of  the  human  race — 
Hawthorne,  that  best  of  Americans,  says  so  some 
where,  and  places  it  in  this  sense  side  by  side  with 
Rome — one's  appreciation  of  it  is  really  a  large  sym 
pathy,  a  comprehensive  love  of  humanity.  For  the 
sake  of  such  a  charity  as  this  one  may  stretch  one's 
allegiance ;  and  the  most  alien  of  the  cockneyfied, 
though  he  may  bristle  with  every  protest  at  the  inti 
mation  that  England  has  set  its  stamp  upon  him,  is 
free  to  admit  with  conscious  pride  that  he  has  sub- 


12  ESSAYS   IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

mitted  to  Londonization.  It  is  a  real  stroke  of  luck 
for  a  particular  country  that  the  capital  of  the  human 
race  happens  to  be  British.  Surely  every  other  peo 
ple  would  have  it  theirs  if  they  could.  Whether  the 
English  deserve  to  hold  it  any  longer  might  be  an  in 
teresting  field  of  inquiry ;  but  as  they  have  not  yet 
let  it  slip,  the  writer  of  these  lines  professes  without 
scruple  that  the  arrangement  is  to  his  personal  taste. 
For,  after  all,  if  the  sense  of  life  is  greatest  there,  it 
is  a  sense  of  the- life  of  people  of  our  incompara 
ble  English  speech.  It  is  the  headquarters  of  that 
strangely  elastic  tongue ;  and  I  make  this  remark 
with  a  full  sense  of  the  terrible  way  in  which  the  idi 
om  is  misused  by  the  populace  in  general,  than  whom 
it  has  been  given  to  few  races  to  impart  to  conversa 
tion  less  of  the  charm  of  tone.  For  a  man  of  letters 
who  endeavors  to  cultivate,  however  modestly,  the 
medium  of  Shakespeare  and  Milton,  of  Hawthorne 
and  Emerson,  who  cherishes  the  notion  of  what  it 
has  achieved  and  what  it  may  even  yet  achieve,  Lon 
don  must  ever  have  a  great  illustrative  and  suggest 
ive  value,  and  indeed  a  kind  of  sanctity.  It  is  the 
single  place  in  which  most  readers,  most  possible 
lovers,  are  gathered  together ;  it  is  the  most  inclusive 
public  and  the  largest  social  incarnation  of  the  lan 
guage,  of  the  tradition.  Such  a  personage  may  well 
let  it  go  for  this,  and  leave  the  German  and  the  Greek 
to  speak  for  themselves,  to  express  the  grounds  of 
their  predilection,  presumably  very  different. 

When  a  social  product  is  so  vast  and  various  it 
may  be  approached  on  a  thousand  different  sides, 


LONDON  13 

and  liked  and  disliked  for  a  thousand  different  rea 
sons.  The  reasons  of  Piccadilly  are  not  those  of 
Camden  Town,  nor  are  the  curiosities  and  discour 
agements  of  Kilburn  the  same  as  those  of  Westmin 
ster  and  Lambeth.  The  reasons  of  Piccadilly — I 
mean  the  friendly  ones — are  those  of  which,  as  a 
general  thing,  the  rooted  visitor  remains  most  con 
scious  ;  but  it  must  be  confessed  that  even  these,  for 
the  most  part,  do  not  lie  upon  the  surface.  The  ab 
sence  of  style,  or  rather  of  the  intention  of  style,  is 
certainly  the  most  general  characteristic  of  the  face 
of  London.  To  cross  to  Paris  under  this  impression 
is  to  find  one's  self  surrounded  with  far  other  stand 
ards.  There  everything  reminds  you  that  the  idea  of 
beautiful  and  stately  arrangement  has  never  been  out 
of  fashion,  that  the  art  of  composition  has  always 
been  at  work  or  at  play.  Avenues  and  squares,  gar 
dens  and  quays,  have  been  distributed  for  effect,  and 
to-day  the  splendid  city  reaps  the  accumulation  of  all 
this  ingenuity.  The  result  is  not  in  every  quarter 
interesting,  and  there  is  a  tiresome  monotony  of  the 
"  fine  "  and  the  symmetrical,  above  all,  of  the  deathly 
passion  for  making  things  "  to  match."  On  the  other 
hand,  the  whole  air  of  the  place  is  architectural.  On 
the  banks  of  the  Thames  it  is  a  tremendous  chapter 
of  accidents — the  London-lover  has  to  confess  to  the 
existence  of  miles  upon  miles  of  the  dreariest,  stodgi 
est  commonness.  Thousands  of  acres  are  covered 
by  low  black  houses  of  the  cheapest  construction, 
without  ornament,  without  grace,  without  character, 
or  even  identity.  In  fact,  there  are  many,  even  in 


14  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

the  best  quarters,  in  all  the  region  of  Mayfair  and 
Belgravia,  of  so  paltry  and  inconvenient,  and  above 
all  of  so  diminutive  a  type  (those  that  are  let  in  lodg 
ings — such  poor  lodgings  as  they  make — may  serve 
as  an  example),  that  you  wonder  what  peculiarly  lim 
ited  domestic  need  they  were  constructed  to  meet. 
The  great  misfortune  of  London,  to  the  eye  (it  is  true 
that  this  remark  applies  much  less  to  the  City),  is  the 
want  of  elevation.  There  is  no  architectural  impres 
sion  without  a  certain  degree  of  height,  and  the  Lon 
don  street-vista  has  none  of  that  sort  of  pride. 

All  the  same,  if  there  be  not  the  intention,  there  is 
at  least  the  accident,  of  style,  which,  if  one  looks  at 
it  in  a  friendly  way,  appears  to  proceed  from  three 
sources.  One  of  these  is  simply  the  general  great 
ness,  and  the  manner  in  which  that  makes  a  differ 
ence  for  the  better  in  any  particular  spot;  so  that, 
though  you  may  often  perceive  yourself  to  be  in  a 
shabby  corner,  it  never  occurs  to  you  that  this  is 
the  end  of  it.  Another  is  the  atmosphere,  with  its 
magnificent  mystifications,  which  flatters  and  super- 
fuses,  makes  everything  brown,  rich,  dim,  vague,  mag 
nifies  distances  and  minimizes  details,  confirms  the 
inference  of  vastness  by  suggesting  that,  as  the  great 
city  makes  everything,  it  makes  its  own  system  of 
weather  and  its  own  optical  laws.  The  last  is  the 
congregation  of  the  parks,  which  constitute  an  orna 
ment  not  elsewhere  to  be  matched,  and  give  the  place 
a  superiority  that  none  of  its  uglinesses  overcome. 
They  spread  themselves  with  such  a  luxury  of  space 
in  the  centre  of  the  town  that  they  form  a  part  of  the 


LONDON  15 

impression  of  any  walk,  of  almost  any  view,  and,  with 
an  audacity  altogether  their  own,  make  a  pastoral 
landscape  under  the  smoky  sky.  There  is  no  mood 
of  the  rich  London  climate  that  is  not  becoming  to 
them — I  have  seen  them  look  delightfully  romantic, 
like  parks  in  novels,  in  the  wettest  winter — and  there 
is  scarcely  a  mood  of  the  appreciative  resident  to 
which  they  have  not  something  to  say.  The  high 
things  of  London,  which  here  and  there  peep  over 
them,  only  make  the  spaces  vaster  by  reminding  you 
that  you  are,  after  all,  not  in  Kent  or  Yorkshire  ;  and 
these  things,  whatever  they  be — rows  of  "eligible" 
dwellings,  towers  of  churches,  domes  of  institutions 
— take  such  an  effective  gray-blue  tint  that  a  clever 
water-colorist  would  seem  to  have  put  them  in  for 
pictorial  reasons. 

The  view  from  the  bridge  over  the  Serpentine  has 
an  extraordinary  nobleness,  and  it  has  often  seemed 
to  me  that  the  Londoner  twitted  with  his  low  stand 
ard  may  point  to  it  with  every  confidence.  In  all  the 
town-scenery  of  Europe  there  can  be  few  things  so 
fine ;  the  only  reproach  it  is  open  to  is  that  it  begs 
the  question  by  seeming — in  spite  of  its  being  the 
pride  of  five  millions  of  people — not  to  belong  to  a 
town  at  all.  The  towers  of  Notre  Dame,  as  they 
rise,  in  Paris,  from  the  island  that  divides  the  Seine, 
present  themselves  no  more  impressively  than  those 
of  Westminster  as  you  see  them  looking  doubly  far 
beyond  the  shining  stretch  of  Hyde  Park  water. 
Equally  admirable  is  the  large,  river-like  manner  in 
which  the  Serpentine  opens  away  between  its  wood- 


1 6  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

ed  shores.  Just  after  you  have  crossed  the  bridge 
(whose  very  banisters,  old  and  ornamental,  of  yellow 
ish-brown  stone,  I  am  particularly  fond  of),  you  enjoy 
on  your  left,  through  the  gate  of  Kensington  Gardens 
as  you  go  towards  Bayswater,  an  altogether  enchant 
ing  vista — a  foot-path  over  the  grass,  which  loses  it 
self  beneath  the  scattered  oaks  and  elms  exactly  as  if 
the  place  were  a  "chase."  There  could  be  nothing 
less  like  London  in  general  than  this  particular  mor 
sel,  and  yet  it  takes  London,  of  all  cities,  to  give  you 
such  an  impression  of  the  country. 

IV 

It  takes  London  to  put  you  in  the  way  of  a  purely 
rustic  walk  from  Netting  Hill  to  Whitehall.  You 
may  traverse  this  immense  distance — a  most  compre 
hensive  diagonal — altogether  on  soft,  fine  turf,  amid 
the  song  of  birds,  the  bleat  of  lambs,  the  ripple  of 
ponds,  the  rustle  of  admirable  trees.  Frequently 
have  I  wished  that,  for  the  sake  of  such  a  daily  lux 
ury  and  of  exercise  made  romantic,  I  were  a  govern 
ment-clerk  living,  in  snug  domestic  conditions,  in  a 
Pembridge  villa — let  me  suppose — and  having  my 
matutinal  desk  in  Westminster.  I  should  turn  into 
Kensington  Gardens  at  their  northwest  limit,  and  I 
should  have  my  choice  of  a  hundred  pleasant  paths 
to  the  gates  of  Hyde  Park.  In  Hyde  Park  I  should 
follow  the  water-side,  or  the  Row,  or  any  other  fancy 
of  the  occasion ;  liking  best,  perhaps,  after  all,  the 
Row  in  its  morning  mood,  with  the  mist  hanging  over 
the  dark-red  course,  and  the  scattered  early  riders 


LONDON  17 

taking  an  identity  as  the  soundless  gallop  brings  them 
nearer.  I  am  free  to  admit  that  in  the  Season,  at  the 
conventional  hours,  the  Row  becomes  a  weariness 
(save  perhaps  just  for  a  glimpse,  once  a  year,  to  re 
mind  one's  self  how  much  it  is  like  Du  Maurier)  ;  the 
preoccupied  citizen  eschews  it,  and  leaves  it  for  the 
most  part  to  the  gaping  barbarian.  I  speak  of  it  now 
from  the  point  of  view  of  the  pedestrian ;  but  for  the 
rider  as  well  it  is  at  its  best  when  he  passes  either  too 
early  or  too  late.  Then,  if  he  be  not  bent  on  compar 
ing  it  to  its  disadvantage  with  the  bluer  and  boskier 
alleys  of  the  Bois  de  Boulogne,  it  will  not  be  spoiled 
by  the  fact  that,  with  its  surface  that  looks  like  tan, 
its  barriers  like  those  of  the  ring  on  which  the  clown 
stands  to  hold  up  the  hoop  to  the  young  lady,  its 
empty  benches  and  chairs,  its  occasional  orange-peel, 
its  mounted  policemen  patrolling  at  intervals  like  ex 
pectant  supernumeraries,  it  offers  points  of  real  con 
tact  with  a  circus  whose  lamps  are  out.  The  sky  that 
bends  over  it  is  frequently  not  a  bad  imitation  of  the 
dingy  tent  of  such  an  establishment.  The  ghosts  of 
past  cavalcades  seem  to  haunt  the  foggy  arena,  and 
somehow  they  are  better  company  than  the  mashers 
and  elongated  beauties  of  current  seasons.  It  is  not 
without  interest  to  remember  that  most  of  the  salient 
figures  of  English  society  during  the  present  century 
—  and  English  society  means,  or  rather  has  hith 
erto  meant,  in  a  large  degree,  English  history — have 
bobbed  in  the  saddle  between  Apsley  House  and 
Queen's  Gate.  You  may  call  the  roll  if  you  care  to, 
and  the  air  will  be  thick  with  dumb  voices  and  dead 
names,  like  that  of  some  Roman  amphitheatre. 


1 8  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

It  is  doubtless  a  signal  proof  of  being  a  London- 
lover  quand  mhne  that  one  should  undertake  an  apol 
ogy  for  so  bungled  an  attempt  at  a  great  public  place 
as  Hyde  Park  Corner.  It  is  certain  that  the  improve 
ments  and  embellishments  recently  enacted  there  have 
only  served  to  call  further  attention  to  the  poverty  of 
the  elements  and  to  the  fact  that  this  poverty  is  ter 
ribly  illustrative  of  general  conditions.  The  place  is 
the  beating  heart  of  the  great  West  End,  yet  its  main 
features  are  a  shabby,  stuccoed  hospital,  the  low  park- 
gates  in  their  neat  but  unimposing  frame,  the  draw 
ing-room  windows  of  Apsley  House  and  of  the  com 
monplace  frontages  on  the  little  terrace  beside  it ;  to 
which  must  be  added,  of  course,  the  only  item  in  the 
whole  prospect  that  is  in  the  least  monumental  —  the 
arch  spanning  the  private  road  beside  the  gardens  of 
Buckingham  Palace.  This  structure  is  now  bereaved 
of  the  rueful  effigy  which  used  to  surmount  it  —  the 
Iron  Duke  in  the  guise  of  a  tin  soldier —  and  has  not 
been  enriched  by  the  transaction  as  much  as  might 
have  been  expected.*  There  is  a  fine  view  of  Picca 
dilly  and  Knightsbridge,  and  of  the  noble  mansions, 
as  the  house  -  agents  call  them,  of  Grosvenor  Place, 
together  with  a  sense  of  generous  space  beyond  the 
vulgar  little  railing  of  the  Green  Park ;  but,  except  for 
the  impression  that  there  would  be  room  for  some 
thing  better,  there  is  nothing  in  all  this  that  speaks  to 
the  imagination  :  almost  as  much  as  the  grimy  desert 

*  The  monument  in  the  middle  of  the  square,  with  Sir  Edgar 
Boehm's  four  fine  soldiers,  had  not  been  set  up  when  these  words 
were  written. 


LONDON  19 

of  Trafalgar  Square  the  prospect  conveys  the  idea  of 
an  opportunity  wasted. 

All  the  same,  on  a  fine  day  in  spring  it  has  an  ex 
pressiveness  of  which  I  shall  not  pretend  to  explain 
the  source  further  than  by  saying  that  the  flood  of  life 
and  luxury  is  immeasurably  great  there.  The  edifices 
are  mean,  but  the  social  stream  itself  is  monumental, 
and  to  an  observer  not  positively  stolid  there  is  more 
excitement  and  suggestion  than  I  can  give  a  reason 
for  in  the  long,  distributed  waves  of  traffic,  with  the 
steady  policemen  marking  their  rhythm,  which  roll  to 
gether  and  apart  for  so  many  hours.  Then  the  great, 
dim  city  becomes  bright  and  kind,  the  pall  of  smoke 
turns  into  a  veil  of  haze  carelessly  worn,  the  air  is 
colored  and  almost  scented  by  the  presence  of  the 
biggest  society  in  the  world,  and  most  of  the  things 
that  meet  the  eye  —  or  perhaps  I  should  say  more  of 
them,  for  the  most  in  London  is,  no  doubt,  ever  the 
realm  of  the  dingy — present  themselves  as  "  well  ap 
pointed."  Everything  shines  more  or  less,  from  the 
window-panes  to  the  dog-collars.  So  it  all  looks,  with 
its  myriad  variations  and  qualifications,  to  one  who 
surveys  it  over  the  apron  of  a  hansom,  while  that  ve 
hicle  of  vantage,  better  than  any  box  at  the  opera, 
spurts  and  slackens  with  the  current. 

It  is  not  in  a  hansom,  however,  that  we  have  figured 
our  punctual  young  man,  whom  we  must  not  desert  as 
he  fares  to  the  southeast,  and  who  has  only  to  cross 
Hyde  Park  Corner  to  find  his  way  all  grassy  again. 
I  have  a  weakness  for  the  convenient,  familiar,  tree 
less,  or  almost  treeless,  expanse  of  the  Green  Park 


20  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

and  the  friendly  part  it  plays  as  a  kind  of  encourage 
ment  to  Piccadilly.  I  am  so  fond  of  Piccadilly  that  I 
am  grateful  to  any  one  or  anything  that  does  it  a  ser 
vice,  and  nothing  is  more  worthy  of  appreciation  than 
the  southward  look  it  is  permitted  to  enjoy  just  after 
it  passes  Devonshire  House  —  a  sweep  of  horizon 
which  it  would  be  difficult  to  match  among  other 
haunts  of  men,  and  thanks  to  which,  of  a  summer's 
day,  you  may  spy,  beyond  the  browsed  pastures  of 
the  foreground  and  middle  distance,  beyond  the  cold 
chimneys  of  Buckingham  Palace  and  the  towers  of 
Westminster  and  the  swarming  river-side  and  all  the 
southern  parishes,  the  hard  modern  twinkle  of  the 
roof  of  the  Crystal  Palace. 

If  the  Green  Park  is  familiar,  there  is  still  less  of 
the  exclusive  in  its  pendant,  as  one  may  call  it — for  it 
literally  hangs  from  the  other,  down  the  hill — the  rem 
nant  of  the  former  garden  of  the  queer,  shabby  old  pal 
ace  whose  black,  inelegant  face  stares  up  St.  James's 
Street.  This  popular  resort  has  a  great  deal  of  char 
acter,  but  I  am  free  to  confess  that  much  of  its  char 
acter  comes  from  its  nearness  to  the  Westminster 
slums.  It  is  a  park  of  intimacy,  and  perhaps  the 
most  democratic  corner  of  London,  in  spite  of  its  be 
ing  in  the  royal  and  military  quarter  and  close  to  all 
kinds  of  stateliness.  There  are  few  hours  of  the  day 
when  a  thousand  smutty  children  are  not  sprawling 
over  it,  and  the  unemployed  lie  thick  on  the  grass  and 
cover  the  benches  with  a  brotherhood  of  greasy  cor 
duroys.  If  the  London  parks  are  the  drawing-rooms 
and  clubs  of  the  poor — that  is,  of  those  poor  (I  admit 


LONDON  2 I 

it  cuts  down  the  number)  who  live  near  enough  to 
them  to  reach  them  —  these  particular  grass-plots 
and  alleys  may  be  said  to  constitute  the  very  salon 
of  the  slums. 

I  know  not  why,  being  such  a  region  of  greatness 
— great  towers,  great  names,  great  memories ;  at  the 
foot  of  the  Abbey,  the  Parliament,  the  fine  fragment 
of  Whitehall,  with  the  quarters  of  the  Guards  of  the 
sovereign  right  and  left — but  the  edge  of  Westminster 
evokes  as  many  associations  of  misery  as  of  empire. 
The  neighborhood  has  been  much  purified  of  late, 
but  it  still  contains  a  collection  of  specimens — though 
it  is  far  from  unique  in  this  —  of  the  low,  black  ele 
ment.  The  air  always  seems  to  me  heavy  and  thick, 
and  here  more  than  elsewhere  one  hears  old  England 
— the  panting,  smoke-stained  Titan  of  Matthew  Ar 
nold's  fine  poem — draw  her  deep  breath  with  effort. 
In  fact  one  is  nearer  to  her  heroic  lungs,  if  those  organs 
are  figured  by  the  great  pinnacled  and  fretted  talking- 
house  on  the  edge  of  the  river.  But  this  same  dense 
and  conscious  air  plays  such  everlasting  tricks  to  the 
eye  that  the  Foreign  Office,  as  you  see  it  from  the 
bridge,  often  looks  romantic,  and  the  sheet  of  water  it 
overhangs  poetic — suggests  an  Indian  palace  bathing 
its  feet  in  the  Ganges.  If  our  pedestrian  achieves 
such  a  comparison  as  this  he  has  nothing  left  but  to 
go  on  to  his  work  —  which  he  will  find  close  at  hand. 
He  will  have  come  the  whole  way  from  the  far  north 
west  on  the  green  —  which  is  what  was  to  be  demon 
strated. 


22  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

V 

I  feel  as  if  I  were  taking  a  tone  almost  of  boastful- 
ness,  and  no  doubt  the  best  way  to  consider  the  mat 
ter  is  simply  to  say — without  going  into  the  treachery 
of  reasons  —  that,  for  one's  self,  one  likes  this  part  or 
the  other.  Yet  this  course  would  not  be  unattended 
with  danger,  inasmuch  as  at  the  end  of  a  few  such 
professions  we  might  find  ourselves  committed  to  a 
tolerance  of  much  that  is  deplorable.  London  is  so 
clumsy  and  so  brutal,  and  has  gathered  together  so 
many  of  the  darkest  sides  of  life,  that  it  is  almost  ri 
diculous  to  talk  of  her  as  a  lover  talks  of  his  mistress, 
and  almost  frivolous  to  appear  to  ignore  her  disfigure 
ments  and  cruelties.  She  is  like  a  mighty  ogress  who 
devours  human  flesh ;  but  to  me  it  is  a  mitigating  cir 
cumstance —  though  it  may  not  seem  so  to  every  one 
—that  the  ogress  herself  is  human.  It  is  not  in  wan 
tonness  that  she  fills  her  maw,  but  to  keep  herself 
alive  and  do  her  tremendous  work.  She  has  no  time 
for  fine  discriminations,  but  after  all  she  is  as  good- 
natured  as  she  is  huge,  and  the  more  you  stand  up  to 
her,  as  the  phrase  is,  the  better  she  takes  the  joke  of 
it.  It  is  mainly  when  you  fall  on  your  face  before  her 
that  she  gobbles  you  up.  She  heeds  little  what  she 
takes,  so  long  as  she  has  her  stint,  and  the  smallest 
push  to  the  right  or  the  left  will  divert  her  wavering 
bulk  from  one  form  of  prey  to  another.  It  is  not  to 
be  denied  that  the  heart  tends  to  grow  hard  in  her 
company ;  but  she  is  a  capital  antidote  to  the  morbid, 
arid  to  live  with  her  successfully  is  an  education  of  the 


LONDON  23 

temper,  a  consecration  of  one's  private  philosophy. 
She  gives  one  a  surface  for  which  in  a  rough  world 
one  can  never  be  too  thankful.  She  may  take  away 
reputations,  but  she  forms  character.  She  teaches 
her  victims  not  to  "mind,"  and  the  great  danger  for 
them  is  perhaps  that  they  shall  learn  the  lesson  too 
well. 

It  is  sometimes  a  wonder  to  ascertain  what  they  do 
mind,  the  best -seasoned  of  her  children.  Many  of 
them  assist,  without  winking,  at  the  most  unfathom 
able  dramas,  and  the  common  speech  of  others  de 
notes  a  familiarity  with  the  horrible.  It  is  her  theory 
that  she  both  produces  and  appreciates  the  exquisite ; 
but  if  you  catch  her  in  flagrant  repudiation  of  both 
responsibilities  and  confront  her  with  the  shortcom 
ing,  she  gives  you  a  look,  with  a  shrug  of  her  colossal 
shoulders,  which  establishes  a  private  relation  with 
you  for  evermore.  She  seems  to  say :  "  Do  you  really 
take  me  so  seriously  as  that,  you  dear,  devoted,  vol 
untary  dupe,  and  don't  you  know  what  an  immeasura 
ble  humbug  I  am?"  You  reply  that  you  shall  know 
it  henceforth ;  but  your  tone  is  good-natured,  with  a 
touch  of  the  cynicism  that  she  herself  has  taught  you  ; 
for  you  are  aware  that  if  she  makes  herself  out  better 
than  she  is,  she  also  makes  herself  out  much  worse. 
She  is  immensely  democratic,  and  that,  no  doubt,  is 
part  of  the  manner  in  which  she  is  salutary  to  the  in 
dividual  ;  she  teaches  him  his  "  place  "  by  an  incom 
parable  discipline,  but  deprives  him  of  complaint  by 
letting  him  see  that  she  has  exactly  the  same  lash  for 
every  other  back.  When  he  has  swallowed  the  lesson 


24  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON    AND    ELSEWHERE 

he  may  enjoy  the  rude  but  unfailing  justice  by  which, 
under  her  eye,  reputations  and  positions  elsewhere 
esteemed  great  are  reduced  to  the  relative.  There 
are  so  many  reputations,  so  many  positions,  that  su- 
pereminence  breaks  down,  and  it  is  difficult  to  be  so 
rare  that  London  can't  match  you.  It  is  a  part  of  her 
good-nature  and  one  of  her  clumsy  coquetries  to  pre 
tend  sometimes  that  she  hasn't  your  equivalent,  as  when 
she  takes  it  into  her  head  to  hunt  the  lion  or  form  a 
ring  round  a  celebrity.  But  this  artifice  is  so  trans 
parent  that  the  lion  must  be  very  candid  or  the  celeb 
rity  very  obscure  to  be  taken  by  it.  The  business  is 
altogether  subjective,  as  the  philosophers  say,  and  the 
great  city  is  primarily  looking  after  herself.  Celeb 
rities  are  convenient — they  are  one  of  the  things  that 
people  can  be  asked  to  "meet"  —  and  lion  -  cutlets, 
put  upon  the  ice,  will  nourish  a  family  through  pe 
riods  of  dearth. 

This  is  what  I  mean  by  calling  London  democratic. 
You  may  be  in  it,  of  course,  without  being  of  it ;  but 
from  the  moment  you  are  of  it — and  on  this  point 
your  own  sense  will  soon  enough  enlighten  you — you 
belong  to  a  body  in  which  a  general  equality  prevails. 
However  exalted,  however  able,  however  rich,  however 
renowned  you  may  be,  there  are  too  many  people  at 
least  as  much  so  for  your  own  idiosyncrasies  to  count. 
I  think  it  is  only  by  being  beautiful  that  you  may 
really  prevail  very  much ;  for  the  loveliness  of  woman 
it  has  long  been  noticeable  that  London  will  go  most 
out  of  her  way.  It  is  when  she  hunts  that  particular 
lion  that  she  becomes  most  dangerous  ;  then  there 


LONDON  25 

are  really  moments  when  you  would  believe,  for  all 
the  world,  that  she  is  thinking  of  what  she  can  give, 
not  of  what  she  can  get.  Lovely  ladies,  before  this, 
have  paid  for  believing  it,  and  will  continue  to  pay  in 
days  to  come.  On  the  whole  the  people  who  are  least 
deceived  are  perhaps  those  who  have  permitted  them 
selves  to  believe,  in  their  own  interest,  that  poverty  is 
not  a  disgrace.  It  is  certainly  not  considered  so  in 
London,  and  indeed  you  can  scarcely  say  where — in 
virtue  of  diffusion  —  it  would  more  naturally  be  ex 
empt.  The  possession  of  money  is,  of  course,  im 
mensely  an  advantage,  but  that  is  a  very  different 
thing  from  a  disqualification  in  the  lack  of  it. 

Good-natured  in  so  many  things  in  spite  of  her  cyn 
ical  tongue,  and  easy-going  in  spite  of  her  tremendous 
pace,  there  is  nothing  in  which  the  large  indulgence 
of  the  town  is  more  shown  than  in  the  liberal  way  she 
looks  at  obligations  of  hospitality  and  the  margin  she 
allows  in  these  and  cognate  matters.  She  wants  above 
all  to  be  amused ;  she  keeps  her  books  loosely,  doesn't 
stand  on  small  questions  of  a  chop  for  a  chop,  and  if 
there  be  any  chance  of  people's  proving  a  diversion, 
doesn't  know  or  remember  or  care  whether  they  have 
"  called."  She  forgets  even  if  she  herself  have  called. 
In  matters  of  ceremony  she  takes  and  gives  a  long 
rope,  wasting  no  time  in  phrases  and  circumvallations. 
It  is  no  doubt  incontestable  that  one  result  of  her  in 
ability  to  stand  upon  trifles  and  consider  details  is  that 
she  has  been  obliged  in  some  ways  to  lower  rather 
portentously  the  standard  of  her  manners.  She  cul 
tivates  the  abrupt — for  even  when  she  asks  you  to 


26  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON    AND    ELSEWHERE 

dine  a  month  ahead  the  invitation  goes  off  like  the 
crack  of  a  pistol — and  approaches  her  ends  not  ex 
actly  par  quatre  chemins.  She  doesn't  pretend  to 
attach  importance  to  the  lesson  conveyed  in  Mat 
thew  Arnold's  poem  of  "  The  Sick  King  in  Bokhara," 
that, 

"Though  we  snatch  what  we  desire, 
We  may  not  snatch  it  eagerly." 

London  snatches  it  more  than  eagerly  if  that  be  the 
only  way  she  can  get  it.  Good  manners  are  a  suc 
cession  of  details,  and  I  don't  mean  to  say  that  she 
doesn't  attend  to  them  when  she  has  time.  She  has 
it,  however,  but  seldom — que  voulez-vous  ?  Perhaps  the 
matter  of  note-writing  is  as  good  an  example  as  an 
other  of  what  certain  of  the  elder  traditions  inevitably 
have  become  in  her  hands.  She  lives  by  notes — they 
are  her  very  heart-beats ;  but  those  that  bear  her  sig 
nature  are  as  disjointed  as  the  ravings  of  delirium, 
and  have  nothing  but  a  postage-stamp  in  common 
with  the  epistolary  art. 

VI 

If  she  doesn't  go  into  particulars  it  may  seem  a 
very  presumptuous  act  to  have  attempted  to  do  so 
on  her  behalf,  and  the  reader  will  doubtless  think  I 
have  been  punished  by  having  egregiously  failed  in 
my  enumeration.  Indeed  nothing  could  well  be  more 
difficult  than  to  add  up  the  items — the  column  would 
be  altogether  too  long.  One  may  have  dreamed  of 
turning  the  glow — if  glow  it  be — of  one's  lantern  on 


LONDON  27 

each  successive  facet  of  the  jewel ;  but,  after  all,  it 
may  be  success  enough  if  a  confusion  of  brightness 
be  the  result.  One  has  not  the  alternative  of  speak 
ing  of  London  as  a  whole,  for  the  simple  reason  that 
there  is  no  such  thing  as  the  whole  of  it.  It  is  im 
measurable — embracing  arms  never  meet.  Rather  it 
is  a  collection  of  many  wholes,  and  of  which  of  them 
is  it  most  important  to  speak  ?  Inevitably  there  must 
be  a  choice,  and  I  know  of  none  more  scientific  than 
simply  to  leave  out  what  we  may  have  to  apologize 
for.  The  uglinesses,  the  "rookeries,"  the  brutalities, 
the  night-aspect  of  many  of  the  streets,  the  gin-shops 
and  the  hour  when  they  are  cleared  out  before  closing 
— there  are  many  elements  of  this  kind  which  have  to 
be  counted  out  before  a  genial  summary  can  be  made. 
And  yet  I  should  not  go  so  far  as  to  say  that  it  is 
a  condition  of  such  geniality  to  close  one's  eyes  upon 
the  immense  misery ;  on  the  contrary,  I  think  it  is 
partly  because  we  are  irremediably  conscious  of  that 
dark  gulf  that  the  most  general  appeal  of  the  great 
city  remains  exactly  what  it  is,  the  largest  chapter  of 
human  accidents.  I  have  no  idea  of  what  the  future 
evolution  of  the  strangely  mingled  monster  may  be ; 
whether  the  poor  will  improve  away  the  rich,  or  the 
rich  will  expropriate  the  poor,  or  they  will  all  continue 
to  dwell  together  on  their  present  imperfect  terms  of 
intercourse.  Certain  it  is,  at  any  rate,  that  the  im 
pression  of  suffering  is  a  part  of  the  general  vibra 
tion  ;  it  is  one  of  the  things  that  mingle  with  all  the 
others  to  make  the  sound  that  is  supremely  dear 
to  the  consistent  London-lover — the  rumble  of  the 


28  ESSAYS   IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

tremendous  human  mill.  This  is  the  note  which, 
in  all  its  modulations,  haunts  and  fascinates  and  in 
spires  him.  And  whether  or  no  he  may  succeed  in 
keeping  the  misery  out  of  the  picture,  he  will  freely 
confess  that  the  latter  is  not  spoiled  for  him  by  some 
of  its  duskiest  shades.  We  are  far  from  liking  Lon 
don  well  enough  till  we  like  its  defects :  the  dense 
darkness  of  much  of  its  winter,  the  soot  on  the  chim 
ney-pots  and  everywhere  else,  the  early  lamplight,  the 
brown  blur  of  the  houses,  the  splashing  of  hansoms 
in  Oxford  Street  or  the  Strand  on  December  after 
noons. 

There  is  still  something  that  recalls  to  me  the  en 
chantments  of  children — the  anticipation  of  Christ 
mas,  the  delight  of  a  holiday  walk — in  the  way  the 
shop-fronts  shine  into  the  fog.  It  makes  each  of 
them  seem  a  little  world  of  light  and  warmth,  and  I 
can  still  waste  time  in  looking  at  them  with  dirty 
Bloomsbury  on  one  side  and  dirtier  Soho  on  the  oth 
er.  There  are  winter  effects,  not  intrinsically  sweet, 
it  would  appear,  which  somehow,  in  absence,  touch 
the  chords  of  memory  and  even  the  fount  of  tears ; 
as,  for  instance,  the  front  of  the  British  Museum  on 
a  black  afternoon,  or  the  portico,  when  the  weather 
is  vile,  of  one  of  the  big  square  clubs  in  Pall  Mall. 
I  can  give  no  adequate  account  of  the  subtle  poetry 
of  such  reminiscences ;  it  depends  upon  associations 
of  which  we  have  often  lost  the  thread.  The  wide 
colonnade  of  the  Museum,  its  symmetrical  wings,  the 
high  iron  fence  in  its  granite  setting,  the  sense  of  the 
misty  halls  within,  where  all  the  treasures  lie — these 


LONDON  29 

things  loom  patiently  through  atmospheric  layers 
which  instead  of  making  them  dreary  impart  to  them 
something  of  a  cheer  of  red  lights  in  a  storm.  I 
think  the  romance  of  a  winter  afternoon  in  London 
arises  partly  from  the  fact  that,  when  it  is  not  alto 
gether  smothered,  the  general  lamplight  takes  this 
hue  of  hospitality.  Such  is  the  color  of  the  interior 
glow  of  the  clubs  in  Pall  Mall,  which  I  positively  like 
best  when  the  fog  loiters  upon  their  monumental  stair 
cases. 

In  saying  just  now  that  these  retreats  may  easily 
be,  for  the  exile,  part  of  the  phantasmagoria  of  home 
sickness,  I  by  no  means  alluded  simply  to  their  solemn 
outsides.  If  they  are  still  more  solemn  within,  that 
does  not  make  them  any  less  dear  in  retrospect,  at 
least,  to  a  visitor  who  is  bent  upon  liking  his  London 
to  the  end.  What  is  the  solemnity  but  a  tribute  to 
your  nerves,  and  the  stillness  but  a  refined  proof  of 
intensity  of  life  ?  To  produce  such  results  as  these 
the  balance  of  many  tastes  must  be  struck,  and  that 
is  only  possible  in  a  very  high  civilization.  If  I  seem 
to  intimate  that  this  last  abstract  term  must  be  the 
cheer,  of  him  who  has  lonely  possession  of  a  foggy 
library,  without  even  the  excitement  of  watching  for 
some  one  to  put  down  the  magazine  he  wants,  I  am 
willing  to  let  the  supposition  pass,  for  the  apprecia 
tion  of  a  London  club  at  one  of  the  empty  seasons  is 
nothing  but  the  strong  expression  of  a  preference  for 
the  great  city — by  no  means  so  unsociable  as  it  may 
superficially  appear — at  periods  of  relative  abandon 
ment.  The  London  year  is  studded  with  holidays, 


30  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

blessed  little  islands  of  comparative  leisure — intervals 
of  absence  for  good  society.  Then  the  wonderful 
English  faculty  for  ''going  out  of  town  for  a  little 
change "  comes  into  illimitable  play,  and  families 
transport  their  nurseries  and  their  bath-tubs  to  those 
rural  scenes  which  form  the  real  substratum  of  the 
national  life.  Such  moments  as  these  are  the  para 
dise  of  the  genuine  London-lover,  for  then  he  finds 
himself  face  to  face  with  the  object  of  his  passion ; 
he  can  give  himself  up  to  an  intercourse  which  at 
other  times  is  obstructed  by  his  rivals.  Then  every 
one  he  knows  is  out  of  town,  and  the  exhilarating 
sense  of  the  presence  of  every  one  he  doesn't  know 
becomes  by  so  much  the  deeper. 

This  is  why  I  pronounce  his  satisfaction  not  an  un 
sociable,  but  a  positively  affectionate  emotion.  It  is 
the  mood  in  which  he  most  measures  the  immense 
humanity  of  the  place,  and  in  which  its  limits  recede 
furthest  into  a  dimness  peopled  with  possible  illustra 
tions.  For  his  acquaintance,  however  numerous  it 
may  be,  is  finite ;  whereas  the  other,  the  unvisited 
London,  is  infinite.  It  is  one  of  his  pleasures  to 
think  of  the  experiments  and  excursions  he  may  .make 
in  it,  even  when  these  adventures  don't  particularly 
come  off.  The  friendly  fog  seems  to  protect  and  en 
rich  them — to  add  both  to  the  mystery  and  security, 
so  that  it  is  most  in  the  winter  months  that  the  imag 
ination  weaves  such  delights.  They  reach  their  cli 
max,  perhaps,  during  the  strictly  social  desolation  of 
Christmas  week,  when  the  country-houses  are  filled  at 
the  expense  of  the  metropolis.  Then  it  is  that  I  am 


LONDON  31 

most  haunted  with  the  London  of  Dickens,  feel  most 
as  if  it  were  still  recoverable,  still  exhaling  its  queer- 
ness  in  patches  perceptible  to  the  appreciative.  Then 
the  big  fires  blaze  in  the  lone  twilight  of  the  clubs, 
and  the  new  books  on  the  tables  say,  "  Now  at  last 
you  have  time  to  read  me,"  and  the  afternoon  tea 
and  toast,  and  the  torpid  old  gentleman  who  wakes 
up  from  a  doze  to  order  potash-water,  appear  to  make 
the  assurance  good.  It  is  not  a  small  matter  either, 
to  a  man  of  letters,  that  this  is  the  best  time  for 
writing,  and  that  during  the  lamplit  days  the  white 
page  he  tries  to  blacken  becomes,  on  his  table,  in  the 
circle  of  the  lamp,  with  the  screen  of  the  climate 
folding  him  in,  more  vivid  and  absorbent.  Those  to 
whom  it  is  forbidden  to  sit  up  to  work  in  the  small 
hours  may,  between  November  and  March,  enjoy  a 
semblance  of  this  luxury  in  the  morning.  The  weath 
er  makes  a  kind  of  sedentary  midnight  and  muffles 
the  possible  interruptions.  It  is  bad  for  the  eyesight, 
but  excellent  for  the  image. 

VII 

Of  course  it  is  too  much  to  say  that  all  the  satis 
faction  of  life  in  London  comes  from  literally  living 
there,  for  it  is  not  a  paradox  that  a  great  deal  of  it  con 
sists  in  getting  away.  It  is  almost  easier  to  leave  it 
than  not  to,  and  much  of  its  richness  and  interest 
proceeds  from  its  ramifications,  the  fact  that  all  Eng 
land  is  in  a  suburban  relation  to  it.  Such  an  affair 
it  is  in  comparison  to  get  away  from  Paris  or  to  get 
into  it.  London  melts  by  wide,  ugly  zones  into  the 


32  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

green  country,  and  becomes  pretty  insidiously,  inad 
vertently —  without  stopping  to  change.  It  is  the 
spoiling,  perhaps,  of  the  country,  but  it  is  the  making 
•  of  the  insatiable  town,  and  if  one  is  a  helpless  and 
shameless  cockney  that  is  all  one  is  obliged  to  look 
at.  Anything  is  excusable  which  enlarges  one's  civic 
consciousness.  It  ministers  immensely  to  that  of 
the  London-lover  that,  thanks  to  the  tremendous  sys 
tem  of  coming  and  going,  to  the  active,  hospitable 
habits  of  the  people,  to  the  elaboration  of  the  railway- 
service,  the  frequency  and  rapidity  of  trains,  and  last, 
though  not  least,  to  the  fact  that  much  of  the  loveli 
est  scenery  in  England  lies  within  a  radius  of  fifty 
miles — thanks  to  all  this  he  has  the  rural  picturesque 
at  his  door  and  may  cultivate  unlimited  vagueness  as 
to  the  line  of  division  between  centre  and  circumfer 
ence.  It  is  perfectly  open  to  him  to  consider  the  re 
mainder  of  the  United  Kingdom,  or  the  British  em 
pire  in  general,  or  even,  if  he  be  an  American,  the 
total  of  the  English-speaking  territories  of  the  globe, 
as  the  mere  margin,  the  fitted  girdle. 

Is  it  for  this  reason — because  I  like  to  think  how 
great  we  all  are  together  in  the  light  of  heaven  and 
the  face  of  the  rest  of  the  world,  with  the  bond  of 
our  glorious  tongue,  in  which  we  labor  to  write  arti 
cles  and  books  for  each  other's  candid  perusal,  how 
great  we  all  are  and  how  great  is  the  great  city  which 
we  may  unite  fraternally  to  regard  as  the  capital  of 
our  race — is  it  for  this  that  I  have  a  singular  kind 
ness  for  the  London  railway-stations,  that  I  like  them 
aesthetically,  that  they  interest  and  fascinate  me,  and 


LONDON  33 

that  I  view  them  with  complacency  even  when  I  wish 
neither  to  depart  nor  to  arrive  ?  They  remind  me  of 
all  our  reciprocities  and  activities,  our  energies  and 
curiosities,  and  our  being  all  distinguished  together 
from  other  people  by  our  great  common  stamp  of  per 
petual  motion,  our  passion  for  seas  and  deserts  and 
the  other  side  of  the  globe,  the  secret  of  the  impres 
sion  of  strength — I  don't  say  of  social  roundness  and 
finish — that  we  produce  in  any  collection  of  Anglo- 
Saxon  types.  If  in  the  beloved  foggy  season  I  de 
light  in  the  spectacle  of  Paddington,  Euston,  or  Wa 
terloo — I  confess  I  prefer  the  grave  northern  stations 
— I  am  prepared  to  defend  myself  against  the  charge 
of  puerility ;  for  what  I  seek  and  what  I  find  in  these 
vulgar  scenes  is  at  bottom  simply  so  much  evidence 
of  our  larger  way  of  looking  at  life.  The  exhibition 
of  variety  of  type  is  in  general  one  of  the  bribes  by 
which  London  induces  you  to  condone  her  abomina 
tions,  and  the  railway-platform  is  a  kind  of  compen 
dium  of  that  variety.  I  think  that  nowhere  so  much 
as  in  London  do  people  wear — to  the  eye  of  observa 
tion — definite  signs  of  the  sort  of  people  they  may  be. 
If  you  like  above  all  things  to  know  the  sort,  you  hail 
this  fact  with  joy ;  you  recognize  that  if  the  English 
are  immensely  distinct  from  other  people,  they  are 
also  socially — and  that  brings  with  it,  in  England,  a 
train  of  moral  and  intellectual  consequences  —  ex 
tremely  distinct  from  each  other.  You  may  see  them 
all  together,  with  the  rich  coloring  of  their  differences, 
in  the  fine  flare  of  one  of  Mr.  W.  H.  Smith's  bookstalls 
— a  feature  not  to  be  omitted  in  any  enumeration  of 
3 


34 


ESSAYS    IN    LONDON    AND    ELSEWHERE 


the  charms  of  Paddington  and  Euston.  It  is  a  focus 
of  warmth  and  light  in  the  vast  smoky  cavern-,  it 
gives  the  idea  that  literature  is  a  thing  of  splendor,  of 
a  dazzling  essence,  of  infinite  gas-lit  red  and  gold.  A 
glamour  hangs  over  the  glittering  booth,  and  a  tan 
talizing  air  of  clever  new  things.  How  brilliant  must 
the  books  all  be,  how  veracious  and  courteous  the 
fresh,  pure  journals  !  Of  a  Saturday  afternoon,  as 
you  wait  in  your  corner  of  the  compartment  for  the 
starting  of  the  train,  the  window  makes  a  frame  for 
the  glowing  picture.  I  say  of  a  Saturday  afternoon, 
because  that  is  the  most  characteristic  time — it  speaks 
most  of  the  constant  circulation  and  in  particular  of 
the  quick  jump,  by  express,  just  before  dinner,  for 
the  Sunday,  into  the  hall  of  the  country-house  and  the 
forms  of  closer  friendliness,  the  prolonged  talks,  the 
familiarizing  walks  which  London  excludes. 

There  is  the  emptiness  of  summer  as  well,  when 
you  may  have  the  town  to  yourself,  and  I  would  dis 
course  of  it — counting  the  summer  from  the  first  of 
August — were  it  not  that  I  fear  to  seem  ungracious 
in  insisting  so  much  on  the  negative  phases.  In 
truth  they  become  positive  in  another  manner,  and 
I  have  an  endearing  recollection  of  certain  happy  ac 
cidents  attached  to  the  only  period  when  London  life 
may  be  said  to  admit  of  accident.  It  is  the  most  lux 
urious  existence  in  the  world,  but  of  that  especial 
luxury — the  unexpected,  the  extemporized — it  has  in 
general  too  little.  In  a  very  tight  crowd  you  can't 
scratch  your  leg,  and  in  London  the  social  pressure 
is  so  great  that  it  is  difficult  to  deflect  from  the  per- 


LONDON  35 

pendicular  or  to  move  otherwise  than  with  the  mass. 
There  is  too  little  of  the  loose  change  of  time ;  every 
half-hour  has  its  preappointed  use,  written  down 
month  by  month  in  a  little  book.  As  I  intimated, 
however,  the  pages  of  this  volume  exhibit  from  Au 
gust  to  November  an  attractive  blankness ;  they  rep 
resent  the  season  during  which  you  may  taste  of  that 
highest  kind  of  inspiration,  the  inspiration  of  the  mo 
ment. 

This  is  doubtless  what  a  gentleman  had  in  mind 
who  once  said  to  me,  in  regard  to  the  vast  resources 
of  London  and  its  having  something  for  every  taste, 
"  Oh,  yes  ;  when  you  are  bored  or  want  a  little 
change  you  can  take  the  boat  clown  to  Blackwall." 
I  have  never  had  occasion  yet  to  resort  to  this  par 
ticular  remedy.  Perhaps  it's  a  proof  that  I  have 
never  been  bored.  Why  Blackwall  ?  I  indeed  asked 
myself  at  the  time  ;  nor  have  I  yet  ascertained  what 
distractions  the  mysterious  name  represents.  My 
interlocutor  probably  used  it  generically,  as  a  free, 
comprehensive  allusion  to  the  charms  of  the  river  at 
large.  Here  the  London-lover  goes  with  him  all  the 
way,  and  indeed  the  Thames  is  altogether  such  a 
wonderful  affair  that  he  feels  he  has  distributed  his 
picture  very  clumsily  not  to  have  put  it  in  the  very 
forefront.  Take  it  up  or  take  it  down,  it  is  equally 
an  adjunct  of  London  life,  an  expression  of  London 
manners. 

From  Westminster  to  the  sea  its  uses  are  commer 
cial,  but  none  the  less  pictorial  for  that ;  while  in  the 
other  direction — taking  it  properly  a  little  further  up 


36  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

— they  are  personal,  social,  athletic,  idyllic.  In  its 
recreative  character  it  is  absolutely  unique.  I  know 
of  no  other  classic  stream  that  is  so  splashed  about 
for  the  mere  fun  of  it.  There  is  something  almost 
droll  and  at  the  same  time  almost  touching  in  the 
way  that  on  the  smallest  pretext  of  holiday  or  fine 
weather  the  mighty  population  takes  to  the  boats. 
They  bump  each  other  in  the  narrow,  charming  chan 
nel  ;  between  Oxford  and  Richmond  they  make  an 
uninterrupted  procession.  Nothing  is  more  sugges 
tive  of  the  personal  energy  of  the  people  and  their 
eagerness  to  take,  in  the  way  of  exercise  and  advent 
ure,  whatever  they  can  get.  I  hasten  to  add  that 
what  they  get  on  the  Thames  is  exquisite,  in  spite  of 
the  smallness  of  the  scale  and  the  contrast  between 
the  numbers  and  the  space.  In  a  word,  if  the  river 
is  the  busiest  suburb  of  London,  it  is  also  by  far  the 
prettiest.  That  term  applies  to  it  less  of  course  from 
the  bridges  down,  but  it  is  only  because  in  this  part 
of  its  career  it  deserves  a  larger  praise.  To  be  con 
sistent,  I  like  it  best  when  it  is  all  dyed  and  disfigured 
with  the  town  and  you  look  from  bridge  to  bridge — 
they  seem  wonderfully  big  and  dim — over  the  brown, 
greasy  current,  the  barges  and  the  penny-steamers, 
the  black,  sordid,  heterogeneous  shores.  This  pros 
pect,  of  which  so  many  of  the  elements  are  ignoble, 
etches  itself  to  the  eye  of  the  lover  of  "  bits  "  with  a 
power  that  is  worthy  perhaps  of  a  better  cause. 

The  way  that  with  her  magnificent  opportunity 
London  has  neglected  to  achieve  a  river-front  is,  of 
course,  the  best  possible  proof  that  she  has  rarely,  in 


LONDON  37 

the  past,  been  in  the  architectural  mood  which  at 
present  shows  somewhat  inexpensive  signs  of  settling 
upon  her.  Here  and  there  a  fine  fragment  apologizes 
for  the  failure  which  it  doesn't  remedy.  Somerset 
House  stands  up  higher  perhaps  than  anything  else 
on  its  granite  pedestal,  and  the  palace  of  Westminster 
reclines — it  can  hardly  be  said  to  stand — on  the  big 
parliamentary  bench  of  its  terrace.  The  Embank 
ment,  which  is  admirable  if  not  particularly  interesting, 
does  what  it  can,  and  the  mannered  houses  of  Chelsea 
stare  across  at  Battersea  Park  like  eighteenth-century 
ladies  surveying  a  horrid  wilderness.  On  the  other 
hand,  the  Charing  Cross  railway-station,  placed  where 
it  is,  is  a  national  crime ;  Milbank  prison  is  a  worse 
act  of  violence  than  any  it  was  erected  to  punish, 
and  the  water-side  generally  a  shameless  renunciation 
of  effect.  We  acknowledge,  however,  that  its  very 
cynicism  is  expressive ;  so  that  if  one  were  to  choose 
again — short  of  there  being  a  London  Louvre — be 
tween  the  usual  English  irresponsibility  in  such  mat 
ters  and  some  particular  flight  of  conscience,  one 
would  perhaps  do  as  well  to  let  the  case  stand.  We 
know  what  it  is,  the  stretch  from  Chelsea  to  Wap- 
ping,  but  we  know  not  what  it  might  be.  It  doesn't 
prevent  my  being  always  more  or  less  thrilled,  of  a 
summer  afternoon,  by  the  journey  on  a  penny-steam 
er  to  Greenwich. 

VIII 

But  why  do  I  talk  of  Greenwich  and  remind  myself 
of  one  of  the  unexecuted  vignettes  with  which  it  had 
been  my  plan  that  these  desultory  and,  I  fear,  some- 


38  ESSAYS   IN   LONDON  AND    ELSEWHERE 

what  incoherent  remarks  should  be  studded  ?  They 
will  present  to  the  reader  no  vignettes  but  those 
which  the  artist  who  has  kindly  consented  to  associ 
ate  himself  with  my  vagaries  may  be  so  good  as  to 
bestow  upon  them.  Why  should  I  speak  of  Hamp- 
stead,  as  the  question  of  summer  afternoons  just 
threatened  to  lead  me  to  do  after  I  should  have  ex 
hausted  the  subject  of  Greenwich,  which  I  may  not 
even  touch  ?  Why  should  I  be  so  arbitrary  when  I 
have  cheated  myself  out  of  the  space  privately  in 
tended  for  a  series  of  vivid  and  ingenious  sketches  of 
the  particular  physiognomy  of  the  respective  quarters 
of  the  town  ?  I  had  dreamed  of  doing  them  all,  with 
their  idiosyncrasies  and  the  signs  by  which  you  shall 
know  them.  It  is  my  pleasure  to  have  learned  these 
signs — a  deeply  interesting  branch  of  observation — 
but  I  must  renounce  the  display  of  my  lore. 

I  haven't  the  conscience  to  talk  about  Hampstead, 
and  what  a  pleasant  thing  it  is  to  ascend  the  long 
hill  which  overhangs,  as  it  were,  St.  John's  Wood  and 
begins  at  the  Swiss  Cottage — you  must  mount  from 
there,  it  must  be  confessed,  as  you  can — and  pick  up 
a  friend  at  a  house  of  friendship  on  the  top,  and 
stroll  with  him  on  the  rusty  Heath,  and  skirt  the  gar 
den-walls  of  the  old  square  Georgian  houses  which 
survive  from  the  time  when,  near  as  it  is  to-day  to 
London,  the  place  was  a  kind  of  provincial  centre, 
with  Joanna  Baillie  for  its  muse,  and  take  the  way  by 
the  Three  Spaniards— I  would  never  miss  that — and 
look  down  at  the  smoky  city  or  across  at  the  Scotch 
firs  and  the  red  sunset.  It  would  never  do  to  make 


LONDON  39 

a  tangent  in  that  direction  when  I  have  left  Kensing 
ton  unsung  and  Bloomsbury  unattempted,  and  have 
said  never  a  word  about  the  mighty  eastward  region 
— the  queer  corners,  the  dark  secrets,  the  rich  sur 
vivals  and  mementoes  of  the  City.  I  particularly  re 
gret  having  sacrificed  Kensington,  the  once-delight 
ful,  the  Thackerayan,  with  its  literary  vestiges,  its 
quiet,  pompous  red  palace,  its  square  of  Queen  Anne, 
its  house  of  Lady  Castlewood,  its  Greyhound  tavern, 
where  Henry  Esmond  lodged. 

But  I  can  reconcile  myself  to  this  when  I  reflect 
that  I  have  also  sacrificed  the  Season,  which  doubt 
less,  from  an  elegant  point  of  view,  ought  to  have 
been  the  central  morceau  in  the  panorama.  I  have 
noted  that  the  London-lover  loves  everything  in  the 
place,  but  I  have  not  cut  myself  off  from  saying  that 
his  sympathy  has  degrees,  or  from  remarking  that 
the  sentiment  of  the  author  of  these  pages  has  never 
gone  all  the  way  with  the  dense  movement  of  the 
British  carnival.  That  is  really  the  word  for  the  pe 
riod  from  Easter  to  midsummer  ;  it  is  a  fine,  decorous, 
expensive,  Protestant  carnival,  in  which  the  masks  are 
not  of  velvet  or  silk,  but  of  wonderful  deceptive  flesh 
and  blood,  the  material  of  the  most  beautiful  com 
plexions  in  the  world.  Holding  that  the  great  inter 
est  of  London  is  the  sense  the  place  gives  us  of  mul 
titudinous  life,  it  is  doubtless  an  inconsequence  not 
to  care  most  for  the  phase  of  greatest  intensity.  But 
there  is  life  and  life,  and  the  rush  and  crush  of  these 
weeks  of  fashion  is  after  all  but  a  tolerably  mechan 
ical  expression  of  human  forces.  No  one  would  deny 


40  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

that  it  is  a  more  universal,  brilliant,  spectacular  one 
than  can  be  seen  anywhere  else  ,  and  it  is  not  a  de 
fect  that  these  forces  often  take  the  form  of  women 
extremely  beautiful.  I  risk  the  declaration  that  the 
London  season  brings  together  year  by  year  an  un 
equalled  collection  of  handsome  persons.  I  say  noth 
ing  of  the  ugly  ones ;  beauty  has  at  the  best  been 
allotted  to  a  small  minority,  and  it  is  never,  at  the 
most,  anywhere,  but  a  question  of  the  number  by 
which  that  minority  is  least  insignificant. 

There  are  moments  when  one  can  almost  forgive 
the  follies  of  June  for  the  sake  of  the  smile  which  the 
sceptical  old  city  puts  on  for  the  time,  and  which,  as  I 
noted  in  an  earlier  passage  of  this  disquisition,  fairly 
breaks  into  laughter  where  she  is  tickled  by  the  vor 
tex  of  Hyde  Park  Corner.  Most  perhaps  does  she 
seem  to  smile  at  the  end  of  the  summer  days,  when 
the  light  lingers  and  lingers,  though  the  shadows 
lengthen  and  the  mists  redden  and  the  belated  riders, 
with  dinners  to  dress  for,  hurry  away  from  the  tram 
pled  arena  of  the  Park.  The  population  at  that  hour 
surges  mainly  westward  and  sees  the  dust  of  the  day's 
long  racket  turned  into  a  dull  golden  haze.  There  is 
something  that  has  doubtless  often,  at  this  particular 
moment,  touched  the  fancy  even  of  the  bored  and  the 
biases  in  such  an  emanation  of  hospitality,  of  waiting 
dinners,  of  the  festal  idea  and  the  whole  spectacle  of 
the  West  End  preparing  herself  for  an  evening  six 
parties  deep.  The  scale  on  which  she  entertains  is 
stupendous,  and  her  invitations  and  "  reminders  "  are 
as  thick  as  the  leaves  of  the  forest. 


LONDON  41 

For  half  an  hour,  from  eight  to  nine,  every  pair  of 
wheels  presents  the  portrait  of  a  diner-out.  To  con 
sider  only  the  rattling  hansoms,  the  white  neckties 
and  "  dressed  "  heads  which  greet  you  from  over  the 
apron  in  a  quick,  interminable  succession,  conveys 
the  overwhelming  impression  of  a  complicated  world. 
Who  are  they  all,  and  where  are  they  all  going,  and 
whence  have  they  come,  and  what  smoking  kitchens 
and  gaping  portals  and  marshalled  flunkies  are  pre 
pared  to  receive  them,  from  the  southernmost  limits 
of  a  loosely-interpreted,  an  almost  transpontine  Bel- 
gravia,  to  the  hyperborean  confines  of  St.  John's 
Wood  ?  There  are  broughams  standing  at  every 
door  and  carpets  laid  down  for  the  footfall  of  the 
issuing  if  not  the  entering  reveller.  The  pavements 
are  empty  now,  in  the  fading  light,  in  the  big  sallow 
squares  and  the  stuccoed  streets  of  gentility,  save  for 
the  groups  of  small  children  holding  others  that  are 
smaller — -Ameliar-Ann  intrusted  with  Sarah  Jane — 
who  collect,  wherever  the  strip  of  carpet  lies,  to  see 
the  fine  ladies  pass  from  the  carriage  or  the  house. 
The  West  End  is  dotted  with  these  pathetic  little 
gazing  groups  ;  it  is  the  party  of  the  poor — their  Sea 
son  and  way  of  dining  out,  and  a  happy  illustration  of 
"  the  sympathy  that  prevails  between  classes."  The 
Avatchers,  I  should  add,  are  by  no  means  all  children, 
but  the  lean  mature  also,  and  I  am  sure  these  wayside 
joys  are  one  of  the  reasons  of  an  inconvenience  much 
deplored — the  tendency  of  the  country  poor  to  flock 
to  London.  Those  who  dine  only  occasionally  or 
never  at  all  have  plenty  of  time  to  contemplate  those 
with  whom  the  custom  has  more  amplitude. 


42  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON  AND   ELSEWHERE 

However,  it  was  not  my  intention  to  conclude  these 
remarks  in  a  melancholy  strain,  and  Heaven  knows 
that  the  diners  are  a  prodigious  company.  It  is  as 
moralistic  as  I  shall  venture  to  be  if  I  drop  a  very  soft 
sigh  on  the  paper  as  I  affirm  that  truth.  Are  they  all 
illuminated  spirits  and  is  their  conversation  the  ripest 
in  the  world  ?  This  is  not  to  be  expected,  nor  should 
I  ever  suppose  it  to  be  desired  that  an  agreeable  so 
ciety  should  fail  to  offer  frequent  opportunity  for  in 
tellectual  rest.  Such  a  shortcoming  is  not  one  of  the 
sins  of  the  London  world  in  general,  nor  would  it  be 
just  to  complain  of  that  world,  on  any  side,  on  grounds 
of  deficiency.  It  is  not  what  London  fails  to  do  that 
strikes  the  observer,  but  the  general  fact  that  she  does 
everything  in  excess.  Excess  is  her  highest  reproach, 
and  it  is  her  incurable  misfortune  that  there  is  really 
too  much  of  her.  She  overwhelms  you  by  quantity 
and  number  —  she  ends  by  making  human  life,  by 
making  civilization,  appear  cheap  to  you.  Wherever 
you  go,  to  parties,  exhibitions,  concerts,  "  private 
views,"  meetings,  solitudes,  there  are  already  more 
people  than  enough  on  the  field.  How  it  makes  you 
understand  the  high  walls  with  which  so  much  of  Eng 
lish  life  is  surrounded,  and  the  priceless  blessing  of  a 
park  in  the  country,  where  there  is  nothing  animated 
but  rabbits  and  pheasants  and,  for  the  worst,  the  im 
portunate  nightingales  !  And  as  the  monster  grows 
and  grows  forever,  she  departs  more  and  more — it 
must  be  acknowledged — from  the  ideal  of  a  conven 
ient  society,  a  society  in  which  intimacy  is  possible, 
in  which  the  associated  meet  often  and  sound  and 


LONDON  43 

| 

select  and  measure  and  inspire  each  other,  and  rela-! 
tions  and  combinations  have  time  to  form  themselves. 
The  substitute  for  this,  in  London,  is  the  momentary 
concussion  of  a  million  of  atoms.  It  is  the  difference 
between  seeing  a  great  deal  of  a  few  and  seeing  a  little 
of  every  one.  "  When  did  you  come — are  you  '  going 
on '?"  and  it  is  over ;  there  is  no  time  even  for  the 
answer.  This  may  seem  a  perfidious  arraignment, 
and  I  should  not  make  it  were  I  not  prepared,  or 
rather  were  I  not  eager,  to  add  two  qualifications. 
One  of  these  is  that,  cumbrously  vast  as  the  place 
may  be,  I  would  not  have  had  it  smaller  by  a  hair's- 
breadth  or  have  missed  one  of  the  fine  and  fruitful 
impatiences  with  which  it  inspires  you  and  which  are 
at  bottom  a  heartier  tribute,  I  think,  than  any  great 
city  receives.  The  other  is  that  out  of  its  richness 
and  its  inexhaustible  good-humor  it  belies  the  next 
hour  any  generalization  you  may  have  been  so  simple 
as  to  make  about  it. 

1888. 


JAMES   RUSSELL   LOWELL 

AFTER  a  man's  long  work  is  over  and  the  sound  of 
his  voice  is  still,  those  in  whose  regard  he  has  held  a 
high  place  find  his  image  strangely  simplified  and  sum 
marized.  The  hand  of  death,  in  passing  over  it,  has 
smoothed  the  folds,  made  it  more  typical  and  general. 
The  figure  retained  by  the  memory  is  compressed 
and  intensified  ;  accidents  have  dropped  away  from  it 
and  shades  have  ceased  to  count ;  it  stands,  sharply, 
for  a  few  estimated  and  cherished  things,  rather  than, 
nebulously,  for  a  swarm  of  possibilities.  We  cut  the 
silhouette,  in  a  word,  out  of  the  confusion  of  life,  we 
save  and  fix  the  outline,  and  it  is  with  his  eye  on  this 
profiled  distinction  that  the  critic  speaks.  It  is  his 
function  to  speak  with  assurance  when  once  his  im 
pression  has  become  final ;  and  it  is  in  noting  this 
circumstance  that  I  perceive  how  slenderly  prompted 
I  am  to  deliver  myself  on  such  an  occasion  as  a  critic. 
It  is  not  that  due  conviction  is  absent ;  it  is  only  that 
the  function  is  a  cold  one.  It  is  not  that  the  final 
impression  is  dim ;  it  is  only  that  it  is  made  on  a 
softer  side  of  the  spirit  than  the  critical  sense.  The 
process  is  more  mystical,  the  deposited  image  is  in 
sistently  personal,  the  generalizing  principle  is  that  of 
loyalty.  I  can  therefore  not  pretend  to  write  of  James 


JAMES   RUSSELL   LOWELL  45 

Russell  Lowell  in  the  tone  of  detachment  and  classi 
fication  ;  I  can  only  offer  a  few  anticipatory  touches 
for  a  portrait  that  asks  for  a  steadier  hand. 

It  may  be  professional  prejudice,  but  as  the  whole 
color  of  his  life  was  literary,  so  it  seems  to  me  that  we 
may  see  in  his  high  and  happy  fortune  the  most  sub 
stantial  honor  gathered  by  the  practice  of  letters  from 
a  world  preoccupied  with  other  things.  It  was  in  look 
ing  at  him  as  a  man  of  letters  that  one  drew  closest 
to  him,  and  some  of  his  more  fanatical  friends  are  not 
to  be  deterred  from  regarding  his  career  as  in  the  last 
analysis  a  tribute  to  the  dominion  of  style.  This  is 
the  idea  that  to  my  sense  his  name  most  promptly 
evokes  ;  and  though  it  was  not  by  any  means  the  only 
idea  he  cherished,  the  unity  of  his  career  is  surely  to 
be  found  in  it.  He  carried  style — the  style  of  litera 
ture — into  regions  in  which  we  rarely  look  for  it :  into 
politics,  of  all  places  in  the  world,  into  diplomacy,  into 
stammering  civic  dinners  and  ponderous  anniversa 
ries,  into  letters  and  notes  and  telegrams,  into  every 
turn  of  the  hour — absolutely  into  conversation,  where 
indeed  it  freely  disguised  itself  as  intensely  colloquial 
wit.  Any  friendly  estimate  of  him  is  foredoomed  to 
savor  potently  of  reminiscence,  so  that  I  may  mention 
how  vividly  I  recall  the  occasion  on  which  he  first 
struck  me  as  completely  representative. 

The  association  could  only  grow,  but  the  essence 
of  it  was  all  there  on  the  eve  of  his  going  as  minister 
to  Spain.  It  was  late  in  the  summer  of  1877  ;  he 
spent  a  few  days  in  London  on  his  way  to  Madrid, 
in  the  hushed  gray  August,  and  I  remember  dining 


46  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON    AND    ELSEWHERE 

with  him  at  a  dim  little  hotel  in  Park  Street,  which 
I  had  never  entered  before  and  have  never  entered 
since,  but  which,  whenever  I  pass  it,  seems  to  look 
at  me  with  the  melancholy  of  those  inanimate  things 
that  have  participated.     That  particular  evening  re 
mained,  in  my  fancy,  a  kind  of  bridge  between  his 
old  bookish  and  his  new  worldly  life  ;  which,  however, 
had  much  more  in  common  than  they  had  in  distinc 
tion.     He  turned  the  pages  of  the  later  experience 
with  very  much  the  same  contemplative  reader's  sense 
with  which  in  his   library  he  had  for  years  smoked 
the  student's  pipe  over  a  thousand  volumes  :  the  only 
difference  was  that  a  good  many  of  the  leaves  were 
still  to  cut.     At   any  rate,  he  was  enviably  gay  and 
amused,  and  this  preliminary  hour  struck  me  literally 
as  the  reward  of  consistency.    It  was  tinted  with  the 
promise    of   a   singularly  interesting  future,  but  the 
saturated  American  time  was  all  behind  it,  and  what 
was  to  come   seemed  an   ideal  opportunity  for  the 
nourished  mind.    That  the  American  years  had  been 
diluted  with  several  visits  to  Europe  was  not  a  flaw 
in  the  harmony,  for  to  recollect  certain  other  foreign 
occasions  —  pleasant  Parisian  and  delightful  Italian 
strolls  —  was  to  remember   that,  if   these  had  been 
months  of  absence  for  him,  they  were  for  me,  on  the 
wings  of    his  talk,  hours  of  repatriation.     This  talk 
was   humorously    and    racily   fond,   charged  with    a 
perfect    drollery  of   reference    to    the    other  country 
(there  were  always  two — the  one  we  were  in  and  the 
one  we  weren't),  the  details  of  my  too  sketchy  con 
ception  of  which,  admitted  for  argument,  he  showed 


JAMES    RUSSELL    LOWELL  47 

endless  good-nature  in  filling  in.  It  was  a  joke, 
polished  by  much  use,  that  I  was  dreadfully  at  sea 
about  my  native  land ;  and  it  would  have  been  pleas 
ant  indeed  to  know  even  less  than  I  did,  so  that  I 
might  have  learned  the  whole  story  from  Mr.  Lowell's 
lips. 

His  America  was  a  country  worth  hearing  about, 
a  magnificent  conception,  an  admirably  consistent 
and  lovable  object  of  allegiance.  If  the  sign  that 
in  Europe  one  knew  him  best  by  was  his  intense 
national  consciousness,  one  felt  that  this  conscious 
ness  could  not  sit  lightly  on  a  man  in  whom  it  was 
the  strongest  form  of  piety.  Fortunately  for  him 
and  for  his  friends  he  was  one  of  the  most  whimsical, 
one  of  the  wittiest  of  human  beings,  so  that  he  could 
play  with  his  patriotism  and  make  it  various.  All 
the  same,  one  felt  in  it,  in  talk,  the  depth  of  passion 
that  hums  through  much  of  his  finest  verse  —  almost 
the  only  passion  that,  to  my  sense,  his  poetry  con 
tains — the  accent  of  chivalry,,  of  the  lover,  the  knight 
ready  to  do  battle  for  his  mistress.  Above  all,  it  was 
a  particular  allegiance  to  New  England — a  quarter  of 
the  earth  in  respect  to  which  the  hand  of  long  habit, 
of  that  affection  which  is  usually  half  convenience, 
never  let  go  the  prime  idea,  the  standard.  New 
England  was  heroic  to  him,  for  he  felt  in  his  pulses 
the  whole  history  of  her  origines ;  it  was  impossible 
to  know  him  without  a  sense  that  he  had  a  rare 
divination  of  the  hard  realities  of  her  past.  "  The 
Biglow  Papers  "  show  to  what  a  tune  he  could  play 
with  his  patriotism  —  all  literature  contains,  I  think, 


48  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

no  finer  sport ;  but  he  is  serious  enough  when  he 
speaks  of  the 

..."  strange  New  World,  that  yit  wast  never  young, 
Whose  youth,  from  thee,  by  gripin'  need  was  wrung  ; 
Brown  foundlin'  of  the  woods  whose  baby-bed 
Was  prowled  round  by  the  Injun's  cracklin'  tread, 
And  who  grew'st  strong  thro'  shifts  and  wants  and  pains, 
Nussed  by  stern  men  with  empires  in  their  brains." 

He  was  never  at  trouble  to  conceal  his  respect  for 
such  an  origin  as  that,  and  when  he  came  to  Europe 
in  1877  this  sentiment  was,  in  his  luggage,  one  of  the 
articles  on  which  he  could  most  easily  put  his  hand. 

One  of  the  others  was  the  extraordinary  youthful- 
ness  which  could  make  a  man  considerably  younger 
than  himself  (so  that  it  was  only  with  the  lapse  of 
years  that  the  relation  of  age  settled  upon  the  right 
note)  constantly  forget  that  he  had  copious  ante 
cedents.  In  the  times  when  the  difference  counted 
for  more  —  old  Cambridge  days  that  seem  far  away 
now — I  doubtless  thought  him  more  professorial  than 
he  felt,  but  I  am  sure  that  in  the  sequel  I  never 
thought  him  younger.  The  boy  in  him  was  never 
more  clamorous  than  during  the  last  summer  that  he 
spent  in  England,  two  years  before  his  death.  Since 
the  recollection  comes  of  itself  I  may  mention  as  my 
earliest  impression  of  him  the  charm  that  certain  of 
his  Harvard  lectures — on  English  literature,  on  Old 
French — had  for  a  very  immature  person  who  was 
supposed  to  be  pursuing,  in  one  of  the  schools,  a 
very  different  branch  of  knowledge,  but  who  on  dusky 
winter  afternoons  escaped  with  irresponsible  zeal 


JAMES    RUSSELL  LOWELL  49 

into  the  glow  of  Mr.  Lowell's  learned  lamplight,  the 
particular  incidence  of  which,  in  the  small,  still  lect 
ure-room,  and  the  illumination  of  his  head  and 
hands,  I  recall  with  extreme  vividness.  He  talked 
communicatively  of  style,  and  where  else  in  all  the 
place  was  any  such  talk  to  be  heard  ?  It  made  a 
romance  of  the  hour  —  it  made  even  a  picture  of 
the  scene  ;  it  was  an  unforgetable  initiation.  If  he 
was  American  enough  in  Europe,  in  America  he  was 
abundantly  European.  He  was  so  steeped  in  history 
and  literature  that  to  some  yearning  young  persons 
he  made  the  taste  of  knowledge  almost  sweeter  than 
it  was  ever  to  be  again.  He  was  redolent,  intellect 
ually  speaking,  of  Italy  and  Spain  ;  he  had  lived  in 
long  intimacy  with  Dante  and  Cervantes  and  Cal- 
deron  ;  he  embodied  to  envious  aspirants  the  happy 
intellectual  fortune  —  independent  years  in  a  full 
library,  years  of  acquisition  without  haste  and  with 
out  rest,  a  robust  love  of  study  which  went  sociably 
arm  in  arm  with  a  robust  love  of  life.  This  love  of 
life  was  so  strong  in  him  that  he  could  lose  himself 
in  little  diversions  as  well  as  in  big  books.  He  was 
fond  of  everything  human  and  natural,  everything 
that  had  color  and  character,  and  no  gayety,  no 
sense  of  comedy,  was  ever  more  easily  kindled  by 
contact.  When  he  was  not  surrounded  by  great 
pleasures  he  could  find  his  account  in  small  ones, 
and  no  situation  could  be  dull  for  a  man  in  whom 
all  reflection,  all  reaction,  was  witty. 

I  waited  some  years  really  to  know  him,  but  it  was 
to  find  at  once  that  he  was  delightful  to  walk  with. 
4 


50  ESSAYS    IN   LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

He  spent  the  winter  of  1872-73  in  Paris,  and  if  I  had 
not  already  been  fond  of  the  streets  of  that  city  his 
example  and  companionship  would  have  made  me 
so.  We  both  had  the  habit  of  long  walks,  and  he 
knew  his  Paris  as  he  knew  all  his  subjects.  The  his 
tory  of  a  thing  was  always  what  he  first  saw  in  it — • 
he  recognized  the  object  as  a  link  in  an  interminable 
chain.  He  led  at  this  season  the  most  home-keep 
ing,  book-buying  life,  and  Old  French  texts  made  his 
evenings  dear  to  him.  He  had  dropped  (and  where 
he  dropped  he  usually  stayed)  into  an  intensely  local 
and  extremely  savory  little  hotel  in  the  Faubourg 
Saint-Germain,  unknown  to  tourists,  but  patronized 
by  deputies,  where  the  table  d'hote,  at  which  the  host 
sat  down  with  the  guests  and  contradiction  flour 
ished,  was  a  page  of  Balzac,  full  of  illustration  for 
the  humorist.  I  used  sometimes  of  a  Sunday  even 
ing  to  dine  there,  and  to  this  day,  on  rainy  winter 
nights,  I  never  cross  the  Seine  amid  the  wet  flare  of 
the  myriad  lamps,  never  note  the  varnished  rush  of 
the  river  or  the  way  the  Louvre  grows  superb  in  the 
darkness,  without  a  recurrent  consciousness  of  the  old 
sociable  errand,  the  sense  of  dipping  into  a  still  denser 
Paris,  with  the  Temps  and  M.  Sarcey  in  my  pocket. 

We  both  spent  the  following  winter  —  he  at  least 
the  larger  part  of  it  —  in  Florence,  out  of  manifold 
memories  of  which  certain  hours  in  his  company, 
certain  charmed  Italian  afternoons  in  Boboli  gar 
dens,  on  San  Miniato  terraces,  come  back  to  me  with 
a  glow  of  their  own.  He  had  indeed  memories  of 
earlier  Italian  times,  some  of  which  he  has  admirably 


JAMES    RUSSELL    LOWELL  51 

recorded  —  anecdotes,  tormenting  to  a  late-comer,  of 
the  superseded,  the  missed.  He  himself,  in  his  per 
petual  freshness,  seemed  to  come  so  late  that  it  was 
always  a  surprise  to  me  that  he  had  started  so  early. 
Almost  any  Italy,  however,  was  good  enough  for  him, 
and  he  kept  criticism  for  great  occasions,  for  the 
wise  relapse,  the  study-chair,  and  the  vanquished 
hesitation  (not  timid,  but  overbrimming,  like  a  vessel 
dangerous  to  move)  of  that  large  prose  pen  which 
was  so  firm  when  once  set  in  motion.  He  liked 
the  Italian  people — he  liked  the  people  everywhere, 
and  the  warm  street  life  and  the  exquisite  idiom  ; 
the  Tuscan  tongue,  indeed,  so  early  ripe  and  yet  still 
so  perfectly  alive,  was  one  of  the  comforts  of  the 
world  to  him.  He  produced  that  winter  a  poem  so 
ample  and  noble  that  it  was  worthy  to  come  into 
being  in  classic  air  —  the  magnificent  elegy  on  the 
death  of  Agassiz,  which  strikes  me  as  a  summary 
of  all  his  vigors  and  felicities,  his  most  genial 
achievement,  and  (after  the  Harvard  "  Commemora 
tion  Ode  ")  the  truest  expression  of  his  poetic  nat 
ure.  It  is  hard  to  lend  to  a  great  old  house,  in 
Italy,  even  when  it  has  become  a  modern  inn,  any 
associations  as  romantic  as  those  it  already  wears ; 
but  what  the  high-windowed  face  of  the  Floren 
tine  Hotel  du  Nord  speaks  to  me  of  to-day,  over 
its  chattering  cab-stand  and  across  the  statued  pillar 
of  the  little  square  of  the  Holy  Trinity,  is  neither  its 
ancient  honor  nor  its  actual  fall,  but  the  sound,  one 
December  evening,  by  the  fire  the  poet  pronounces 
"  starved,"  of 


52  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

<k  I  cannot  think  he  wished  so  soon  to  die 
With  all  his  senses  full  of  eager  heat, 

And  rosy  years  that  stood  expectant  by 

To  buckle  the  winged  sandals  on  their  feet, 

He  that  was  friends  with  Earth,  and  all  her  sweet 

Took  with  both  hands  unsparingly." 

Of  Mr.  Lowell's  residence  in  Spain  I  know  noth 
ing  but  what  I  gathered  from  his  talk  after  he  took 
possession,  late  in  the  spring  of  1879,  of  the  post 
in  London  rendered  vacant  by  the  retirement  of  Mr. 
John  Welsh ;  much  of  it  inevitably  referring  to  the 
domestic  sorrow  —  the  prolonged  illness  of  his  ad 
mirable  wife  —  which  cast  over  these  years  a  cloud 
that  darkened  further  during  the  early  part  of  his 
English  period.  I  remember  getting  from  him  a 
sense  that  a  diplomatic  situation  at  Madrid  was  not 
quite  so  refreshing  a  thing  as  might  have  been  ex 
pected,  and  that  for  the  American  representative  at 
least  there  was  not  enough  business  to  give  a  savor 
to  duty.  This  particular  representative's  solution 
of  every  personal  problem,  however,  was  a  page  of 
philology  in  a  cloud  of  tobacco,  and  as  he  had  seen 
the  picture  before  through  his  studies,  so  now  he 
doubtless  saw  his  studies  through  the  picture.  The 
palace  was  a  part  of  it,  where  the  ghost  of  Charles 
V.  still  walked  and  the  princesses  were  what  is  called 
in  princesses  literary.  The  diplomatic  circle  was 
animated — if  that  be  the  word — by  whist ;  what  his 
own  share  of  the  game  was  enlivened  by  may  be 
left  to  the  imagination  of  those  who  remember  the 
irrepressibility,  on  his  lips,  of  the  comic  idea.  It 


JAMES    RUSSELL    LOWELL  53 

might  have  been  taken  for  granted  that  he  was  well 
content  to  be  transferred  to  England ;  but  I  have 
no  definite  recollection  of  the  degree  of  his  satis 
faction  beforehand.  I  think  he  was  mainly  con 
scious  of  the  weight  of  the  new  responsibility,  so 
that  the  unalloyed  pleasure  was  that  of  his  friends 
and  of  the  most  enlightened  part  of  the  public  in 
the  two  countries,  to  which  the  appointment  ap 
peared  to  have  an  unusual  felicity.  It  was  made, 
as  it  were,  for  quality,  and  that  continued  to  be  the 
sign  of  the  function  so  long  as  Mr.  Lowell  exercised 
it.  The  difficulty  — •  if  I  may  speak  of  difficulty  — 
was  that  all  judgment  of  it  was  necessarily  a  priori. 
It  was  impossible  for  him  to  know  what  a  success, 
in  vulgar  parlance,  he  might  make  of  a  totally  un 
tried  character,  and,  above  all,  to  foresee  how  this 
character  would  adapt  itself  to  his  own  disposition. 
During  the  years  of  his  residence  in  London  on  an 
official  footing  it  constantly  struck  me  that  it  was 
the  office  that  inclined  at  every  turn  to  him,  rather 
than  he  who  inclined  to  the  office. 

I  may  appear  to  speak  too  much  of  this  phase  of 
his  life  as  the  most  memorable  part  of  it — especially 
considering  how  short  a  time  it  occupied  in  regard 
to  the  whole  ;  but  in  addition  to  its  being  the  only 
long  phase  of  which  I  can  speak  at  all  closely  from 
personal  observation,  it  is  just  to  remember  that  these 
were  the  years  in  which  all  the  other  years  were  made 
most  evident.  "  We  knew  him  and  valued  him  ages 
before,  and  never  stinted  our  appreciation,  never 
waited  to  care  for  him  till  he  had  become  the  fash- 


54  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON    AND    ELSEWHERE 

ion,"  his  American  readers  and  listeners,  his  pupils 
and  colleagues,  might  say;  to  which  the  answer  is 
that  those  who  admired  him  most  were  just  those 
who  might  naturally  rejoice  in  the  multiplication  of 
his  opportunities.  He  came  to  London  with  only  a 
vague  notion,  evidently,  of  what  these  opportunities 
were  to  be,  and  in  fact  there  was  no  defining  them  in 
advance :  what  they  proved  to  be,  on  the  -spot,  was 
anything  and  everything  that  he  might  make  them. 
I  remember  hearing  him  say  a  day  or  two  after  his 
arrival,  "  Oh,  I've  lost  all  my  wit — you  mustn't  look 
to  me  for  good  things  now.'"  The  words  were  uttered 
to  a  gentleman  who  had  found  one  of  his  "  things  " 
very  good,  and  who,  having  a  political  speech  to  make 
in  a  day  or  two,  had  thriftily  asked  his  leave  to  bring 
it  in.  There  could  have  been  no  better  example  of 
the  experimental  nature  of  his  acceptance  of  the 
post ;  for  the  very  foundation  of  the  distinction  that 
he  gave  it  was  his  great  reserve  of  wit.  He  had  no 
idea  how  much  he  had  left  till  he  tried  it,  and  he  had 
never  before  had  so  much  occasion  to  try  it.  This 
uncertainty  might  pervade  the  minds  even  of  such  of 
his  friends  as  had  a  near  view  of  his  start ;  but  those 
friends  would  have  had  singularly  little  imagination 
if  they  had  failed  to  be  struck  in  a  general  way  with 
the  highly  civilized  character  of  his  mission.  There 
are  circumstances  in  operation  (too  numerous  to  re 
cite)  which  combine  to  undermine  greatly  the  com 
fort  of  the  representative  of  the  United  States  in  a 
foreign  country ;  it  is,  to  speak  summarily,  in  many 
respects  a  singularly  embarrassing  honor.  I  cannot 


JAMES    RUSSELL    LOWELL  55 

express  more  strongly  how  happy  Mr.  Lowell's  oppor 
tunity  seemed  to  be  than  by  saying  that  he  struck 
people  at  the  moment  as  enviable.  It  was  an  inten 
sification  of  the  impression  given  by  the  glimpse  of 
him  on  his  way  to  Spain.  The  true  reward  of  an  Eng 
lish  style  was  to  be  sent  to  England,  and  if  his  career 
in  that  country  was  throughout  amusing,  in  the  high 
est  sense  of  the  term,  this  result  was,  for  others  at 
least,  a  part  of  their  gratified  suspense  as  to  the  fur 
ther  possibilities  of  the  style. 

From  the  friendly  and  intimate  point  of  view  it  was 
presumable  from  the  first  that  there  would  be  a  kind 
of  drama,  a  spectacle  ;  and  if  one  had  already  lived 
a  few  years  in  London  one  could  have  an  interesting 
prevision  of  some  of  its  features.  London  is  a  great 
personage,  and  with  those  with  whom  she  establishes 
a  relation  she  always  plays,  as  it  were,  her  game. 
This  game,  throughout  Mr.  Lowell's  residence,  but 
especially  during  the  early  part,  was  exciting ;  so 
much  so  that  I  remember  being  positively  sorry,  as 
if  I  were  leaving  the  theatre  before  the  fall  of  the 
.curtain,  when,  at  that  time,  more  than  once  I  found 
myself,  by  visits  to  the  Continent,  obliged  to  turn  my 
back  upon  it.  The  sight  of  his  variety  was  a  help  to 
know  London  better ;  and  it  was  a  question  whether 
he  could  ever  know  her  so  well  as  those  who  could 
freely  consider  the  pair  together.  He  offered  her 
from  the  first  a  nut  to  crack,  a  morsel  to  roll  under 
her  tongue.  She  is  the  great  consumer  of  spices  and 
sweets ;  if  I  were  not  afraid  of  forcing  the  image  I 
should  say  that  she  is  too  unwieldy  to  feed  herself, 


56  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON    AND    ELSEWHERE 

and  requires,  in  recurring  seasons,  as  she  sits  pro 
digiously  at  her  banquet,  to  be  approached  with  the 
consecrated  ladle.  She  placed  this  implement  in  Mr. 
Lowell's  hands  with  a  confidence  so  immediate  as  to 
be  truly  touching — a  confidence  that  speaks  for  the 
eventual  amalgamation  of  the  Anglo-Saxon  race  in 
a  way  that  surely  no  casual  friction  can  obliterate. 
She  can  confer  conspicuity,  at  least  for  the  hour,  so 
well  that  she  is  constantly  under  the  temptation  to 
do  so ;  she  holds  a  court  for  those  who  speak  to  her, 
and  she  is  perpetually  trying  voices.  She  recognized 
Mr.  Lowell's  from  the  first,  and  appointed  him  really 
her  speaker-in-chief.  She  has  a  peculiar  need,  which 
when  you  know  her  well  you  understand,  of  being 
eased  off  with  herself,  and  the  American  minister 
speedily  appeared  just  the  man  to  ease  her.  He 
played  into  her  talk  and  her  speeches,  her  commemo 
rations  and  functions,  her  dinners  and  discussions, 
her  editorials  and  anecdotes.  She  has  immense 
wheels  which  are  always  going  rcund,  and  the  pon 
derous  precision  of  which  can  be  observed  only  on 
the  spot.  They  naturally  demand  something  to  grind,, 
and  the  machine  holds  out  great  iron  hands  and 
draws  in  reputations  and  talents,  or  sometimes  only 
names  and  phrases. 

Mr.  Lowell  immediately  found  himself  in  England, 
whether  to  his  surprise  or  no  I  am  unable  to  say,  the 
first  of  after-dinner  speakers.  It  was  perhaps  some 
what  to  the  surprise  of  his  public  there,  for  it  was 
not  to  have  been  calculated  in  advance  that  he  would 
have  become  so  expert  in  his  own  country — a  coun- 


JAMES    RUSSELL    LOWELL  57 

try  sparing  of  feast-days  and  ceremonies.  His  prac 
tice  had  been  great  before  he  came  to  London,  but 
his  performance  there  would  have  been  a  strain  upon 
any  practice.  It  was  a  point  of  honor  with  him 
never  to  refuse  a  challenge,  and  this  attitude,  under 
the  circumstances,  was  heroic,  for  he  became  a  con 
venience  that  really  tended  to  multiply  occasions. 
It  was  exactly  his  high  competence  in  these  direc 
tions  that  constituted  the  practical  good  effect  of  his 
mission,  the  particular  manner  in  which  it  made  for 
civilization.  It  was  the  revanche  of  letters ;  that 
throughout  was  the  particular  note  of  the  part  he 
played.  There  would  have  been  no  revanche  if  he 
had  played  it  inadequately ;  therefore  it  was  a  pleas 
ure  to  feel  that  he  was  accomplished  up  to  the  hilt. 
Those  who  didn't  like  him  pronounced  him  too  ac 
complished,  too  omniscient ;  but,  save  in  a  sense  that 
I  will  specify,  I  never  saw  him  commit  himself  unad 
visedly,  and  much  is  to  be  forgiven  a  love  of  precise 
knowledge  which  keeps  a  man  out  of  mistakes.  He 
had  a  horror  of  them  ;  no  one  was  ever  more  in  love 
with  the  idea  of  being  right  and  of  keeping  others 
from  being  wrong.  The  famous  Puritan  conscience, 
which  was  a  persistent  part  of  his  heredity,  operated 
in  him  perhaps  most  strongly  on  the  scholarly  side. 
He  enjoyed  the  detail  of  research  and  the  discussion 
of  differences,  and  he  had  an  instinct  for  rectification 
which  was  unflinching.  All  this  formed  a  part  of  the 
enviability  I  have  noted — the  serenity  of  that  larger 
reputation  which  came  to  him  late  in  life,  which  had 
been  paid  for  in  advance,  and  in  regard  to  which  his 


58  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

finished  discharge  of  his  diplomatic  duties  acted,  if 
not  certainly  as  a  cause,  at  least  as  a  stimulus.  The 
reputation  was  not  doubtless  the  happiest  thing;  the 
happiest  thing  was  the  inward  opportunity,  the  chance 
to  absorb  into  an  intelligence  extraordinarily  prepared 
a  peculiarly  full  revelation. 

He  had  studied  English  history  for  forty  years  in 
the  texts,  and  at  last  he  could  study  it  in  the  pieces 
themselves,  could  handle  and  verify  the  relics.  For 
the  man  who  in  such  a  position  recognizes  his  advan 
tages  England  makes  herself  a  museum  of  illustration. 
She  is  at  home  in  the  comfortable  dust  of  her  ages, 
where  there  is  no  need  of  excavation,  as  she  has 
never  been  buried,  and  the  explorer  finds  the  ways  as 
open  to  him  as  the  corridors  of  an  exhibition.  It  was 
an  exhibition  of  which  Mr.  Lowell  never  grew  tired, 
for  it  was  infinitely  various  and  living ;  it  brought 
him  back  repeatedly  after  his  public  mission  had  ex 
pired,  and  it  was  perpetually  suggestive  to  him  while 
that  mission  lasted.  If  he  played  his  part  so  well 
here — I  allude  now  more  particularly  to  the  social 
and  expressive  side  of  it — it  was  because  he  was  so 
open  to  suggestion.  Old  England  spoke  to  him  so 
much  as  a  man  of  letters  that  it  was  inevitable  he 
should  answer  her  back.  On  the  firmness  and  tact 
with  which  he  acquitted  himself  of  his  strictly  diplo 
matic  work  I  shall  not  presume  to  touch ;  his  success 
was  promptly  appreciated  in  quarters  where  the  offi 
cial  record  may  be  found,  as  well  as  in  others  less 
discoverable  to-day,  columns  congruous  with  their 
vituperative  "  headings,"  where  it  must  be  looked  for 


JAMES    RUSSELL    LOWELL  59 

between  the  lines.  These  latter  responsibilities,  be 
gotten  mainly  of  the  great  Irish  complication,  were 
heavy  ones,  but  they  were  presumably  the  keenest 
interest  of  his  term,  and  I  include  them  essentially 
in  the  picture  afforded  by  that  term  of  the  supremely 
symmetrical  literary  life — the  life  in  which  the  con 
trasts  have  been  effectively  timed  ;  in  which  the  in 
vading  and  acclaiming  world  has  entered  too  late  to 
interfere,  to  distract,  but  still  in  time  to  fertilize ;  in 
which  contacts  have  multiplied  and  horizons  widened 
gradually ;  in  which,  in  short,  the  dessert  has  come 
after  the  dinner,  the  answer  after  the  question,  and 
the  proof  after  the  patience. 

I  may  seem  to  exaggerate  in  Mr.  Lowell's  history 
the  importance  of  the  last  dozen  years  of  his  life— 
especially  if  the  reckoning  be  made  of  the  amount  of 
characteristic  production  that  preceded  them.  He 
was  the  same  admirable  writer  that  he  appears  to-day 
before  he  touched  diplomacy — he  had  already  given 
to  the  world  the  volumes  on  which  his  reputation 
rests.  I  cannot  attempt  in  this  place  and  at  this  hour 
a  critical  estimate  of  his  writings  ;  the  perspective  is 
too  short  and  our  acquaintance  too  recent.  Yet  I 
have  been  reading  him  over  in  fragments,  not  to 
judge,  but  to  recall  him,  and  it  is  as  impossible  to 
speak  of  him  without  the  sense  of  his  high  place  as 
it  would  be  with  the  pretension  to  be  final  about  it. 
He  looms,  in  such  a  renewed  impression,  very  large 
and  ripe  and  sane,  and  if  he  was  an  admirable  man 
of  letters  there  should  be  no  want  of  emphasis  on  the 
first  term  of  the  title.  He  was  indeed  in  literature  a 


60  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

man  essentially  masculine,  upright,  downright.  Pre 
senting  to  us  survivors  that  simplified  face  that  I 
have  spoken  of,  he  almost  already  looks  at  us  as  the 
last  accomplished  representative  of  the  joy  of  life. 
His  robust  and  humorous  optimism  rounds  itself 
more  and  more ;  he  has  even  now  something  of  the 
air  of  a  classic,  and  if  he  really  becomes  one  it  will 
be  in  virtue  of  his  having  placed  as  fine  an  irony  at 
the  service  of  hope  as  certain  masters  of  the  other 
strain  have  placed  at  that  of  despair.  Sturdy  liberal 
as  he  was  and  contemptuous  of  all  timidities  of  ad 
vance  and  reservations  of  faith,  one  thinks  of  him 
to-day,  at  the  point  at  which  we  leave  him,  as  the  last 
of  the  literary  conservatives.  He  took  his  stand  on 
the  ancient  cheerful  wisdom,  many  of  the  ingenious 
modern  emendations  of  which  seemed  to  him  simply 
droll. 

Few  things  were  really  so  droll  as  he  could  make 
them,  and  not  a  great  many  perhaps  are  so  absolute. 
The  solution  of  the  problem  of  life  lay  for  him  in  ac 
tion,  in  conduct,  in  decency;  his  imagination  lighted 
up  to  him  but  scantily  the  region  of  analysis  and 
apology.  Like  all  interesting  literary  figures  he  is 
full  of  tacit  as  well  as  of  uttered  reference  to  the  con 
ditions  that  engendered  him ;  he  really  testifies  as 
much  as  Hawthorne  to  the  New  England  spirit,  though 
in  a  totally  different  tone.  The  two  writers,  as  wit 
nesses,  weigh  against  each  other,  and  the  picture 
would  be  imperfect  if  both  had  not  had  a  hand  in  it. 
If  Hawthorne  expressed  the  mysticism  and  the  gloom 
of  the  transplanted  Puritan,  his  passive  and  haunted 


JAMES    RUSSELL    LOWELL  6 1 

side,  Lowell  saw  him  in  the  familiar  daylight  of  prac 
tice  and  prosperity  and  good  health.  The  author  of 
"  The  Biglow  Papers  "  was  surely  the  healthiest  of 
highly  cultivated  geniuses,  just  as  he  was  the  least 
flippant  of  jesters  and  the  least  hysterical  of  poets. 
If  Hawthorne  fairly  cherished  the  idea  of  evil  in  man, 
Lowell's  vision  of  "  sin  "  was  operative  mainly  for  a 
single  purpose — that  of  putting  in  motion  the  civic 
lash.  "  The  Biglow  Papers  "  are  mainly  an  exposure 
of  national  injustice  and  political  dishonesty ;  his 
satiric  ardor  was  simply  the  other  side  of  the  medal 
of  his  patriotism.  His  poetry  is  not  all  satirical,  but 
the  highest  and  most  sustained  flights  of  it  are  patri 
otic,  and  in  reading  it  over  I  am  struck  with  the  vivid 
virtue  of  this  part  of  it — something  strenuous  and 
antique,  the  watchful  citizen  smiting  the  solemn  lyre. 
The  look  at  life  that  it  embodies  is  never  merely 
curious,  never  irresponsible  ;  it  is  only  the  author's 
humor  that  is  whimsical,  never  his  emotion  nor  his 
passion.  His  poetical  performance  might  sometimes, 
no  doubt,  be  more  intensely  lyrical,  but  it  is  hard  to 
see  how  it  could  be  more  intensely  moral — I  mean,  of 
course,  in  the  widest  sense  of  the  term.  His  play  is 
as  good  as  a  game  in  the  open  air;  but  when  he  is 
serious  he  is  as  serious  as  Wordsworth,  and  much 
more  compact.  He  is  the  poet  of  pluck  and  purpose 
and  action,  of  the  gayety  and  liberty  of  virtue.  He 
commemorates  all  manly  pieties  and  affections,  but 
rarely  conceals  his  mistrust  of  overbrimming  sensibil 
ity.  If  the  ancients  and  the  Elizabethans,  he  some 
where  says,  "had  not  discovered  the  picturesque,  as 


62  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND   ELSEWHERE 

we  understand  it,  they  found  surprisingly  fine  scenery 
in  man  and  his  destiny,  and  would  have  seen  some- 
thing  ludicrous,  it  may  be  suspected,  in  the  spectacle 
of  a  grown  man  running  to  hide  his  head  in  the  apron 
of  the  Mighty  Mother  whenever  he  had  an  ache  in  his 
finger  or  got  a  bruise  in  the  tussle  for  existence."  It 
is  visible  that  the  poetic  occasion  that  was  most  after 
his  own  heart  was  the  storm  and  stress  of  the  Civil 
War.  He  vibrated  in  this  long  tension  more  deeply 
than  in  any  other  experience.  It  was  the  time  that 
kindled  his  steadiest  fire,  prompted  his  noblest  verse, 
and  gave  him  what  he  relished  most,  a  ground  for 
high  assurance,  a  sense  of  being  sturdily  in  the 
right  and  having  something  to  stand  up  for.  He 
never  feared  and  never  shirked  the  obligation  to  be 
positive.  Firm  and  liberal  critic  as  he  was,  and  with 
nothing  of  party  spirit  in  his  utterance  save  in  the 
sense  that  his  sincerity  was  his  party,  his  mind  had 
little  affinity  with  superfine  estimates  and  shades  and 
tints  of  opinion :  when  he  felt  at  all  he  felt  altogeth 
er —  was  always  on  the  same  side  as  his  likings  and 
loyalties.  He  had  no  experimental  sympathies,  and 
no  part  of  him  was  traitor  to  the  rest. 

This  temper  drove  the  principle  of  subtlety  in  his 
intelligence,  which  is  a  need  for  the  last  refinement, 
to  take  refuge  in  one  particular,  and  I  must  add  very 
spacious,  corner,  where  indeed  it  was  capable  of  the 
widest  expansion.  The  thing  he  loved  most  in  the 
world  after  his  country  was  the  English  tongue,  of 
which  he  was  an  infallible  master,  and  his  devotion  to 
which  was,  in  fact,  a  sort  of  agent  in  his  patriotism. 


JAMES    RUSSELL    LOWELL  63 

The  two  passions,  at  any  rate,  were  closely  connected, 
and  I  will  not  pretend  to  have  determined  whether  the 
Western  republic  was  dear  to  him  because  he  held  that 
it  was  a  magnificent  field  for  the  language,  or  whether 
the  language  was  dear  to  him  because  it  had  felt  the 
impact  of  Massachusetts.  He  himself  was  not  unhap 
pily  responsible  for  a  large  part  of  the  latter  occur 
rence.  His  linguistic  sense  is  perhaps  the  thing  his 
reputation  may  best  be  trusted  to  rest  upon — I  mean, 
of  course,  in  its  large  outcome  of  style.  There  is  a 
high  strain  of  originality  in  it.  for  it  is  difficult  to  re 
call  a  writer  of  our  day  in  whom  the  handling  of  words 
has  been  at  once  such  an  art  and  such  a  science.  Mr. 
Lowell's  generous  temperament  seems  here  to  triumph 
in  one  quarter,  while  his  educated  patience  triumphs 
in  the  other.  When  a  man  loves  words  singly  he  is 
apt  not  to  care  for  them  in  an  order,  just  as  a  very 
great  painter  may  be  quite  indifferent  to  the  chemical 
composition  of  his  colors.  But  Mr.  Lowell  was  both 
chemist  and  artist ;  the  only  wonder  was  that  with  so 
many  theories  about  language  he  should  have  had  so 
much  lucidity  left  for  practice.  He  used  it  both  as  an 
antiquarian  and  as  a  lover  of  life,  and  was  a  capital 
instance  of  the  possible  harmony  between  imagination 
and  knowledge  —  a  living  proof  that  the  letter  does 
not  necessarily  kill. 

His  work  represents  this  reconciled  opposition,  ref 
erable  as  it  is  half  to  the  critic  and  half  to  the  poet. 
If  either  half  suffers  just  a  little  it  is  perhaps  in  places 
his  poetry,  a  part  of  which  is  I  scarcely  know  what  to 
say  but  too  literary,  more  the  result  of  an  interest  in 


64  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

the  general  form  than  of  the  stirred  emotion.  One 
feels  at  moments  that  he  speaks  in  verse  mainly  be 
cause  he  is  penetrated  with  what  verse  has  achieved. 
But  these  moments  are  occasional,  and  when  the 
stirred  emotion  does  give  a  hand  to  the  interest  in  the 
general  form  the  product  is  always  of  the  highest 
order.  His  poems  written  during  the  war  all  glow 
with  a  splendid  fusion  —  one  can  think  of  nothing  at 
once  more  personal  and,  in  the  highest  sense  of  the 
word,  more  professional.  To  me,  at  any  rate,  there  is 
something  fascinating  in  the  way  in  which,  in  the 
Harvard  "  Commemoration  Ode,"  for  instance,  the  air 
of  the  study  mingles  with  the  hot  breath  of  passion. 
The  reader  who  is  eternally  bribed  by  form  may  ask 
himself  whether  Mr.  Lowell's  prose  or  his  poetry  has 
the  better  chance  of  a  long  life — the  hesitation  being 
justified  by  the  rare  degree  in  which  the  prose  has 
the  great  qualities  of  style ;  but  in  the  presence  of 
some  of  the  splendid  stanzas  inspired  by  the  war-time 
(and  among  them  I  include,  of  course,  the  second 
series  of  "  The  Biglow  Papers  ")  one  feels  that,  what 
ever  shall  become  of  the  essays,  the  transmission 
from  generation  to  generation  of  such  things  as  these 
may  safely  be  left  to  the  national  conscience.  They 
translate  with  equal  exaltation  and  veracity  the  high 
est  national  mood,  and  it  is  in  them  that  all  younger 
Americans,  those  now  and  lately  reaching  manhood, 
may  best  feel  the  great  historic  throb,  the  throb  un 
known  to  plodding  peace.  No  poet  surely  has  ever 
placed  the  concrete  idea  of  his  country  in  a  more  ro 
mantic  light  than  Mr.  Lowell ;  none  certainly,  speak- 


JAMES    RUSSELL    LOWELL  65 

ing  as  an  American  to  Americans,  has  found  on  its 
behalf  accents  more  eloquently  tender,  more  beguil 
ing  to  the  imagination. 

"Dear  land  whom  triflers  now  make  bold  to  scorn 
(Thee  from  whose  forehead  Earth  awaits  her  mom). 

"  Oh  Beautiful  !    my  Country  !    ours  once  more  ! 

Smoothing  thy  gold  of  war-dishevelled  hair 
O'er  such  sweet  brows  as  never  other  wore, 
And  letting  thy  set  lips, 
Freed  from  wrath's  pale  eclipse, 
The  rosy  edges  of  their  smile  lay  bare  !" 

Great  poetry  is  made  only  by  a  great  meaning,  and 
the  national  bias,  I  know,  never  made  anything  better 
that  was  not  good  in  itself ;  but  each  time  I  read  over 
the  Harvard  "  Commemoration  Ode  "  the  more  full 
and  strong,  the  more  august  and  pathetic,  does  it  ap 
pear.  This  is  only  a  proof  that  if  the  national  senti 
ment  preserves  it  the  national  sentiment  will  show 
excellent  taste  —  which  she  has  been  known  in  some 
cases  not  to  do. 

If  I  were  not  afraid  of  falling  into  the  tone  of  liter 
ary  criticism  I  should  speak  of  several  of  the  impres 
sions — that  is,  of  the  charmed  absorption — accompa 
nying  an  attentive  reperusal  of  the  four  or  five  volumes 
of  Mr.  Lowell's  poetry.  The  word  I  have  already 
used  comes  back  to  me  :  it  is  all  so  masculine,  so  fine 
without  being  thin,  so  steadied  by  the  temperament 
of  the  author.  It  is  intensely  literary  and  yet  intense 
ly  warm,  warm  with  the  contact  of  friendly  and  do 
mestic  things,  loved  local  sights  and  sounds,  the  color 
and  odor  of  New  England,  and  (here  particularly 

5 


66  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

warm  without  fever)  with  the  sanest,  lucidest  intellect 
ual  life.  There  is  something  of  seasonable  nature  in 
every  verse  —  the  freshness  of  the  spirit  sociable  with 
earth  and  sky  and  stream.  In  the  best  things  there 
is  the  incalculable  magic  note — all  the  more  effective 
from  the  general  ground-tone  of  reason.  What  could 
be  more  strangely  sweet  than  the  little  poem  of 
"  Phoebe,"  in  "  Heartsease  and  Rue  " — a  reminiscence 
of  the  saddest  of  small  bird-notes  caught  in  the  dim 
mest  of  wakeful  dawns  ?  What  could  be  more  largely 
vivid,  more  in  the  grand  style  of  friendship  and  por 
traiture,  than  the  masterly  composition  on  the  death 
of  Agassiz,  in  which  the  very  tenderness  of  regret 
flushes  faintly  with  humor,  and  ingenuity  broadens  at 
every  turn  into  eloquence  ?  Such  a  poem  as  this — im 
mensely  fortunate  in  reflecting  an  extraordinary  per 
sonality — takes  its  place  with  the  few  great  elegies 
in  our  language,  gives  a  hand  to  "  Lycidas "  and 
to  "  Thyrsis." 

I.  may  not  go  into  detail,  or  I  should  speak  of  twen 
ty  other  things,  especially  of  the  mellow,  witty  wisdom 
of  "The  Cathedral"  and  of  the  infinite,  intricate  del 
icacy  of  "  Endymion  " — more  tremulous,  more  pene 
trating  than  any  other  of  the  author's  poetic  produc 
tions,  I  think,  and  exceptionally  fine  in  surface.  As 
for  "The  Biglow  Papers,"  they  seem  to  me,  in  re 
gard  to  their  author,  not  so  much  produced  as  pro 
ductive — productive  of  a  clear,  delightful  image  of  the 
temper  and  nature  of  the  man.  One  says  of  them  not 
that  they  are  fry  him,  but  that  they  are  his  very  self, 
so  full  of  his  opinions  and  perceptions,  his  humor  and 


JAMES    RUSSELL    LOWELL  67 

his  wit,  his  character,  his  experience,  his  talk,  and  his 
intense  consciousness  of  race.  They  testify  to  many 
things,  but  most  of  all  to  the  thing  I  have  last  named ; 
and  it  may  seem  to  those  whose  observation  of  the 
author  was  most  complete  during  the  concluding 
years  of  his  life  that  they  could  testify  to  nothing 
more  characteristic.  If  he  was  inveterately,  in  Eng 
land  and  on  the  Continent,  the  American  abroad 
(though  jealous,  indeed,  of  the  liberty  to  be  at  home 
even  there),  so  the  lucubrations  of  Parson  Wilbur  and 
his  contributors  are  an  unsurpassably  deliberate  ex 
hibition  of  the  primitive  home-quality.  I  may  seem 
to  be  going  far  when  I  say  that  they  constitute  to  my 
sense  the  author's  most  literary  production  ;  they  ex 
emplify,  at  any  rate,  his  inexhaustible  interest  in  the 
question  of  style  and  his  extraordinary  acuteness  in 
dealing  with  it.  They  are  a  wonderful  study  of  style 
— by  which  I  mean  of  organized  expression — and 
nothing  could  be  more  significant  than  the  fact  that 
he  should  have  put  his  finest  faculty  for  linguistics  at 
the  service  of  the  Yankee  character. 

He  knew  more,  I  think,  about  the  rustic  American 
speech  than  all  others  together  who  have  known  any 
thing  of  it,  so  much  more  closely,  justly,  and  sympa 
thetically  had  he  noted  it.  He  honored  it  with  the 
strongest  scientific  interest,  and  indeed  he  may  well 
have  been  on  terms  of  reciprocity  with  a  dialect  that 
had  enabled  him  to  produce  a  masterpiece.  The 
only  drawback  I  can  imagine  to  a  just  complacency  in 
this  transaction  would  have  been  the  sense  that  the 
people  are  few,  after  all,  who  can  measure  the  minute 


68  ESSAYS   IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

perfection  of  the  success — a  success  not  only  of  swift 
insight,  but  of  patient  observation.  Mr.  Lowell  was 
as  capable  of  patience  in  illustrating  New  England 
idiosyncrasies  as  he  was  capable  of  impatience.  He 
never  forgot,  at  any  rate,  that  he  stood  there  for  all 
such  things — stood  for  them  particularly  during  the 
years  he  spent  in  England  ;  and  his  attitude  was  made 
up  of  many  curious  and  complicated  and  admirable 
elements.  He  was  so  proud — not  for  himself,  but 
for  his  country — that  he  felt  the  need  of  a  kind  of 
official  version  of  everything  at  home  that  in  other 
quarters  might  be  judged  anomalous.  Theoretically 
he  cared  little  for  the  judgment  of  other  quarters, 
and  he  was  always  amused — the  good-natured  Brit 
ish  lion  in  person  could  not  have  been  more  so — at 
"  well-meaning  "  compliment  or  commendation  ;  it  re 
quired,  it  must  be  admitted,  more  tact  than  is  usually 
current  to  incur  the  visitation  of  neither  the  sharper 
nor  the  sunnier  form  of  his  irony.  But,  in  fact,  the 
national  consciousness  was  too  acute  in  him  for  slum 
ber  at  his  post,  and  he  paid  in  a  certain  restlessness 
the  penalty  of  his  imagination,  of  the  fatal  sense  of 
perspective  and  the  terrible  faculty  of  comparison. 
It  would  have  been  intolerable  to  him,  moreover,  to 
be  an  empirical  American,  and  he  had  organized  his 
loyalty  with  a  thoroughness  of  which  his  admirable 
wit  was  an  efficient  messenger.  He  never  antici 
pated  attack,  though  it  would  be  a  meagre  account 
of  his  attitude  to  say  it  was  defensive ;  but  he  took 
appreciation  for  granted,  and  eased  the  way  for  it 
with  reasons  that  were  cleverer  in  nothing  than  in 


JAMES    RUSSELL    LOWELL  69 

appearing  casual.  These  reasons  were  innumerable, 
but  they  were  all  the  reasons  of  a  lover.  It  was  not 
simply  that  he  loved  his  country — he  was  literally  in 
love  with  it. 

If  there  be  two  kinds  of  patriotism,  the  latent  and 
the  patent,  his  kind  was  essentially  the  latter.  Some 
people  for  whom  the  world  is  various  and  universal, 
and  who  dread  nothing  so  much  as  seeing  it  minim 
ized,  regard  this  particular  sentiment  as  a  purely  prac 
tical  one,  a  prescription  of  duty  in  a  given  case,  like 
a  knack  with  the  coiled  hose  when  the  house  is  on 
fire  or  the  plunge  of  the  swimmer  when  a  man  is 
overboard.  They  grudge  it  a  place  in  the  foreground 
of  the  spirit — they  consider  that  it  shuts  out  the  view. 
Others  find  it  constantly  comfortable  and  perpetually 
fresh — find,  as  it  were,  the  case  always  given ;  for  them 
the  immediate  view  is  the  view  and  the  very  atmosphere 
of  the  mind,  so  that  it  is  a  question  not  only  of  perform 
ance,  but  of  contemplation  as  well.  Mr.  Lowell's  ho 
rizon  was  too  wide  to  be  curtained  out,  and  his  intel 
lectual  curiosity  such  as  to  have  effectually  prevented 
his  shutting  himself  up  in  his  birth-chamber  ;  but  if 
the  local  idea  never  kept  his  intelligence  at  home, 
he  solved  the  difficulty  by  at  least  never  going  forth 
without  it.  When  he  quitted  the  hearth  it  was  with 
the  household  god  in  his  hand,  and  as  he  delighted 
in  Europe,  it  was  to  Europe  that  he  took  it.  Never 
had  a  household  god  such  a  magnificent  outing,  nor 
was  made  free  of  so  many  strange  rites  and  climes ; 
never,  in  short,  had  any  patriotism  such  a  liberal  air 
ing.  If,  however,  Mr.  Lowell  was  loath  to  admit  that 


7<D  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON    AND    ELSEWHERE 

the  American  order  could  have  an  infirmity,  I  think  it 
was  because  it  would  have  cost  him  so  much  to  ac 
knowledge  that  it  could  have  communicated  one  to 
an  object  that  he  cherished  as  he  cherished  the  Eng 
lish  tongue.  That  was  the  innermost  atmosphere  of 
his  mind,  and  he  never  could  have  afforded  on  this 
general  question  any  policy  but  a  policy  of  annexa 
tion.  He  was  capable  of  convictions  in  the  light  of 
which  it  was  clear  that  the  language  he  wrote  so  ad 
mirably  had  encountered  in  the  United  States  not 
corruption,  but  conservation.  Any  conviction  of  his 
on  this  subject  was  a  contribution  to  science,  and  he 
was  zealous  to  show  that  the  speech  of  New  England 
was  most  largely  that  of  an  England  older  and  more 
vernacular  than  the  England  that  to-day  finds  it  queer. 
He  was  capable  of  writing  perfect  American  to  bring 
out  this  archaic  element.  He  kept  in  general  the 
two  tongues  apart,  save  in  so  far  as  his  English  style 
betrayed  a  connection  by  a  certain  American  tact  in 
the  art  of  leaving  out.  He  was  perhaps  sometimes 
slightly  paradoxical  in  the  contention  that  the  lan 
guage  had  incurred  no  peril  in  its  Western  adventures ; 
this  is  the  sense  in  which  I  meant  just  now  that  he 
occasionally  crossed  the  line.  The  difficulty  was  not 
that  his  vision  of  pure  English  could  not  fail  in  Amer 
ica  sometimes  to  be  clouded  —  the  peril  was  for  his 
vision  of  pure  American.  His  standard  was  the  high 
est,  and  the  wish  was  often  no  doubt  father  to  the 
thought.  "  The  Biglow  Papers  "  are  delightful,  but 
nothing  could  be  less  like  "  The  Biglow  Papers  "  than 
the  style  of  the  American  newspaper.  He  lent  his 


JAMES    RUSSELL   LOWELL  71 

wit  to  his  theories,  but  one  or  two  of  them  lived  on 
him  like  unthrifty  sons. 

None  the  less  it  was  impossible  to  be  witness  of 
his  general  action  during  his  residence  in  England 
without  feeling  that,  not  only  by  the  particular  things 
he  did,  but  by  the  general  thing  he  was,  he  contrib 
uted  to  a  large  ideal  of  peace.  We  certainly  owe  to 
him  (and  by  "  we  "  I  mean  both  countries — he  made 
that  plural  elastic)  a  mitigation  of  danger.  There  is 
always  danger  between  country  and  country,  and  dan 
ger  in  small  and  shameful  forms  as  well  as  big  and 
inspiring  ones ;  but  the  danger  is  less  and  the  dream 
of  peace  more  rosy  when  they  have  been  beguiled 
into  a  common  admiration.  A  common  aversion 
even  will  do — the  essential  thing  is  the  disposition 
to  share.  The  poet,  the  writer,  the  speaker  minis 
ters  to  this  community;  he  is  Orpheus  with  his  lute 
—the  lute  that  pacifies  the  great,  stupid  beasts  of 
international  prejudice  ;  so  that  if  a  quarrel  takes 
place  over  the  piping  form  of  the  loved  of  Apollo  it 
is  as  if  he  were  rent  again  by  the  Maenads.  It  was  a 
charm  to  the  observant  mind  to  see  how  Mr.  Lowell 
kept  the  Maenads  in  their  place — a  work  admirably 
continued  by  his  successor  in  office,  who  had,  indeed, 
under  his  roof  an  inestimable  assistant  in  the  proc 
ess.  Mr.  Phelps  was  not,  as  I  may  say,  single-hand 
ed  ;  which  was  his  predecessor's  case  even  for  some 
time  prior  to  an  irreparable  bereavement.  The  pry 
ing  Furies — at  any  rate,  during  these  years — were  ef 
fectually  snubbed,  and  will,  it  is  to  be  hoped,  never 
again  hold  their  snaky  heads  very  high.  The  spell 


72  ESSAYS   IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

that  worked  upon  them  was  simply  the  voice  of  civ 
ilization,  and  Mr.  Lowell's  advantage  was  that  he 
happened  to  find  himself  in  a  supremely  good  place 
for  producing  it.  He  produced  it  both  conscious 
ly  and  unconsciously,  both  officially  and  privately, 
from  principle  and  from  instinct,  in  the  hundred 
spots,  on  the  thousand  occasions  which  it  is  one  of 
the  happiest  idiosyncrasies  of  English  life  to  supply ; 
and  since  I  have  spoken  so  distinctly  of  his  patri 
otism,  I  must  add  that,  after  all,  he  exercised  the 
virtue  most  in  this  particular  way.  His  new  friends 
liked  him  because  he  was  at  once  so  fresh  and  so 
ripe,  and  this  was  predominantly  what  he  understood 
by  being  a  good  American.  It  was  by  being  one  in 
this  sense  that  he  broke  the  heart  of  the  Furies. 

The  combination  made  a  quality  which  pervaded 
his  whole  intellectual  character;  for  the  quality  of 
his  diplomatic  action,  of  his  public  speeches,  of  his 
talk,  of  his  influence,  was  simply  the  genius  that  we 
had  always  appreciated  in  his  critical  writings.  The 
hours  and  places  with  which  he  had  to  deal  were  not 
equally  inspiring;  there  was  inevitably  colorless  com 
pany,  there  were  dull  dinners,  influences  prosaic  and 
functions  mechanical ;  but  he  was  substantially  al 
ways  the  messenger  of  the  Muses  and  of  that  partic 
ular  combination  of  them  which  had  permitted  him 
to  include  a  tenth  in  their  number — the  infallible  sis 
ter  to  whom  humor  is  dear.  I  mean  that  the  man 
and  the  author,  in  him,  were  singularly  convertible ; 
it  was  what  made  the  author  so  vivid.  It  was  also 
what  made  that  voice  of  civilization  to  whose  har- 


JAMES    RUSSELL    LOWELL  73 

mony  I  have  alluded  practically  the  same  thing  as  the 
voice  of  literature.  Mr.  Lowell's  style  was  an  inde 
feasible  part  of  him,  as  his  correspondence,  if  it  be 
ever  published,  will  copiously  show ;  it  was  in  all  rela 
tions  his  natural  channel  of  communication.  This  is 
why,  at  the  opening  of  this  paper,  I  ventured  to  speak 
of  his  happy  exercise  of  a  great  opportunity  as  at  bot 
tom  the  revenge  of  letters.  This,  at  any  rate,  the  lit 
erary  observer  was  free  to  see  in  it  •  such  an  observer 
made  a  cross  against  the  day,  as  an  anniversary  for 
form,  and  an  anniversary  the  more  memorable  that 
form,  when  put  to  tests  that  might  have  been  called 
severe,  was  so  far  from  being  found  wanting  in  sub 
stance  ;  met  the  occasion,  in  fact,  so  completely.  I 
do  not  pretend  that,  during  Mr.  Lowell's  residence  in 
England,  the  public  which  he  found  constituted  there 
spent  most  of  its  time  in  reading  his  essays  ;  I  only 
mean  that  the  faculty  it  relished  in  him  most  was  the 
faculty  most  preserved  for  us  in  his  volumes  of  criti 
cism. 

It  is  not  an  accident  that  I  do  not  linger  over  the 
contents  of  these  volumes — this  has  not  been  a  part 
of  my  undertaking.  They  will  not  go  out  of  fashion, 
they  will  keep  their  place  and  hold  their  own ;  for 
they  are  full  of  broad-based  judgment  and  of  those 
stamped  sentences  of  which  we  are  as  naturally  re 
tentive  as  of  gold  and  silver  coin.  Reading  them 
lately  over  in  large  portions,  I  was  struck  not  only 
with  the  particular  "good  things"  that  abound  in 
them,  but  with  the  soundness  and  fulness  of  their 
inspiration.  It  is  intensely  the  air  of  letters,  but  it 


74  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

is  like  that  of  some  temperate  and  restorative  clime. 
I  judge  them,  perhaps,  with  extravagant  fondness,  for 
I  am  attached  to  the  class  to  which  they  belong;  I 
like  such  an  atmosphere,  I  like  the  aromatic  odor  of 
the  book-room.  In  turning  over  Mr.  Lowell's  crit 
ical  pages  I  seem  to  hear  the  door  close  softly  behind 
me  and  to  find  in  the  shaded  lamplight  the  condi 
tions  most  in  harmony  with  the  sentient  soul  of  man. 
I  see  an  apart/nent  brown  and  book-lined,  which  is 
the  place  in  the  world  most  convertible  into  other 
places.  The  turning  of  the  leaves,  the  crackling  of 
the  fire,  are  the  only  things  that  break  its  stillness — 
the  stillness  in  which  mild  miracles  are  wrought. 
These  are  the  miracles  of  evocation,  of  resurrection, 
of  transmission,  of  insight,  of  history,  of  poetry.  It 
may  be  a  little  room,  but  it  is  a  great  space ;  it  may 
be  a  deep  solitude,  but  it  is  a  mighty  concert.  In 
this  critical  chamber  of  Mr.  Lowell's  there  is  a  charm, 
to  my  sense,  in  knowing  what  is  outside  of  the  closed 
door — it  intensifies  both  the  isolation  and  the  experi 
ence.  The  big  new  Western  order  is  outside,  and  yet 
within  all  seems  as  immemorial  as  Persia.  It  is  like 
a  little  lighted  cabin,  full  of  the  ingenuities  of  home, 
in  the  gray  of  a  great  ocean.  Such  ingenuities  of 
home  are  what  represent  in  Mr.  Lowell's  case  the 
conservatism  of  the  author.  His  home  was  the  past 
that  dipped  below  the  verge — it  was  there  that  his 
taste  was  at  ease.  From  what  quarter  his  disciples 
in  the  United  States  will  draw  their  sustenance  it  is 
too  soon  to  say ;  the  question  will  be  better  answered 
when  we  have  the  disciples  more  clearly  in  our  eye. 


JAMES   RUSSELL    LOWELL  75 

We  seem  already,  however,  to  distinguish  the  quar 
ter  from  which  they  will  not  draw  it.  Few  of  them 
as  yet  appear  to  have  in  their  hand,  or  rather  in  their 
head,  any  such  treasure  of  knowledge. 

It  was  when  his  lifetime  was  longest  that  the  fruit 
of  culture  was  finest  in  him  and  that  his  wit  was  most 
profuse.  In  the  admirable  address  on  Democracy 
that  he  pronounced  at  Birmingham  in  1884,  in  the 
beautiful  speech  on  the  Harvard  anniversary  of  1886, 
things  are  so  supremely  well  said  that  we  feel  our 
selves  reading  some  consecrated  masterpiece ;  they 
represent  great  literary  art  in  its  final  phase  of  great 
naturalness.  There  are  places  where  he  seems  in 
mystical  communication  with  the  richest  sources  of 
English  prose.  "  But  this  imputed  and  vicarious 
longevity,  though  it  may  be  obscurely  operative  in 
our  lives  and  fortunes,  is  no  valid  offset  for  the  short 
ness  of  our  days,  nor  widens  by  a  hair's-breadth  the 
horizon  of  our  memories."  He  sounds  like  a  young 
er  brother  of  Bacon  and  of  Milton,  either  of  whom, 
for  instance,  could  not  have  uttered  a  statelier  word 
on  the  subject  of  the  relinquishment  of  the  required 
study  of  Greek  than  that  "  Oblivion  looks  in  the  face 
of  the  Grecian  Muse  only  to  forget  her  errand."  On 
the  other  hand,  in  the  address  delivered  in  1884  be 
fore  the  English  WordsAvorth  Society,  he  sounds  like 
no  one  but  his  inveterately  felicitous  self.  In  certain 
cases  Wordsworth,  like  Elias  the  prophet,  "  '  stands 
up  as  fire  and  his  word  burns  like  a  lamp.'  But  too 
often,  when  left  to  his  own  resources  and  to  the  con 
scientious  performance  of  the  duty  laid  upon  him  to 


76  ESSAYS   IN   LONDON   AND   ELSEWHERE 

be  a  great  poet  quand  meme,  he  seems  diligently  in 
tent  on  producing  fire  by  the  primitive  method  of 
rubbing  the  dry  sticks  of  his  blank  verse  one  against 
the  other,  while  we  stand  in  shivering  expectation  of 
the  flame  that  never  comes."  It  would  be  difficult 
to  express  better  the  curious  evening  chill  of  the 
author  of  "  The  Excursion,"  which  is  so  like  the  con 
scious  mistake  of  camping  out  in  autumn. 

It  was  an  extreme  satisfaction  to  the  very  many 
persons  in  England  who  valued  Mr.  Lowell's  soci 
ety  that  the  termination  of  his  official  mission  there 
proved  not  the  termination  of  the  episode.  He  came 
back  for  his  friends — he  would  have  done  anything 
for  his  friends.  He  also,  I  surmise,  came  back  some 
what  for  himself,  inasmuch  as  he  entertained  an  af 
fection  for  London  which  he  had  no  reason  for  con 
cealing.  For  several  successive  years  he  reappeared 
there  with  the  brightening  months,  and  I  am  not  sure 
that  this  irresponsible  and  less  rigorously  sociable 
period  did  not  give  him  his  justest  impressions.  It 
surrendered  him,  at  any  rate,  more  completely  to  his 
friends  and  to  several  close  and  particularly  valued 
ties.  He  felt  that  he  had  earned  the  right  to  a  few 
frank  predilections.  English  life  is  a  big  pictured 
story-book,  and  he  could  dip  into  the  volume  where 
he  liked.  It  was  altogether  delightful  to  turn  some 
of  the  pages  with  him,  and  especially  to  pause — for 
the  marginal  commentary  in  finer  type,  some  of  it  the 
model  of  the  illuminating  foot-note — over  the  inter 
minable  chapter  of  London. 

It  is  very  possible  not  to  feel  the  charm  of  Lon- 


JAMES    RUSSELL   LOWELL  77 

don  at  all ;  the  foreigner  who  feels  it  must  be  tolera 
bly  sophisticated.  It  marks  the  comparative  com 
munity  of  the  two  big  branches  of  the  English  race 
that  of  all  aliens,  under  this  heavy  pressure,  Ameri 
cans  are  the  most  submissive.  They  are  capable  of 
loving  the  capital  of  their  race  almost  with  passion, 
which  for  the  most  part  is  the  way  it  is  loved  when  it 
is  not  hated.  The  sentiment  was  strong  in  Mr.  Low 
ell  ;  one  of  the  branches  of  his  tree  of  knowledge  had 
planted  itself  and  taken  root  here,  and  at  the  end  he 
came  back  every  year  to  sit  in  the  shade  of  it.  He 
gave  himself  English  summers,  and  if  some  people 
should  say  that  the  gift  was  scarcely  liberal,  others 
who  met  him  on  this  ground  will  reply  that  such  sea 
sons  drew  from  him  in  the  circle  of  friendship  a  ra 
diance  not  inherent  in  their  complexion.  This  asso 
ciation  became  a  feature  of  the  London  May  and  June 
— it  held  its  own  even  in  the  rank  confusion  of  July. 
It  pervaded  the  quarter  he  repeatedly  inhabited,  where 
a  commonplace  little  house,  in  the  neighborhood  of 
the  Paddington  station,  will  long  wear  in  its  narrow 
front,  to  the  inner  sense  of  many  passers,  a  mystical 
gold-lettered  tablet.  Here  he  came  and  went,  during 
several  months,  for  such  and  such  a  succession  of 
years ;  here  one  could  find  him  at  home  in  the  late 
afternoon,  in  his  lengthened  chair,  with  his  cherished 
pipe  and  his  table  piled  high  with  books.  Here  he 
practised  little  jesting  hospitalities,  for  he  was  irre- 
pressibly  and  amusingly  hospitable.  Whatever  he 
was  in  his  latest  time,  it  was,  even  in  muffled  miser 
ies  of  gout,  with  a  mastery  of  laughter  and  forgetful- 


78  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

ness.  Nothing  amused  him  more  than  for  people  to 
dine  with  him,  and  few  things  certainly  amused  them 
as  much.  His  youth  came  back  to  him  not  once  for 
all,  but  twenty  times  for  every  occasion.  He  was 
certainly  the  most  boyish  of  learned  doctors. 

This  was  always  particularly  striking  during  the 
several  weeks  of  August  and  September  that  he  had 
formed  the  habit  of  spending  at  Whitby,  on  the  York 
shire  coast.  It  was  here,  I  think,  that  he  was  most 
naturally  at  his  ease,  most  humorously  evaded  the 
hard  bargain  of  time.  The  place  is  admirable — an 
old,  red-roofed  fishing-town  in  one  of  the  indentations 
of  a  high,  brave  coast,  with  the  ruins  of  a  great  abbey 
just  above  it,  an  expanse  of  purple  moor  behind,  and 
a  convenient  extension  in  the  way  of  an  informal  little 
modern  watering-place.  The  mingled  breath  of  the 
sea  and  the  heather  makes  a  medium  that  it  is  a  joy 
to  inhale,  and  all  the  land  is  picturesque  and  noble, 
a  happy  hunting-ground  for  the  good  walker  and  the 
lover  of  grand  lines  and  fine  detail.  Mr.  Lowell  was 
wonderful  in  both  these  characters,  and  it  was  in  the 
active  exercise  of  them  that  I  saw  him  last.  He  was 
in  such  conditions  a  delightful  host  and  a  prime  ini 
tiator.  Two  of  these  happy  summer  days  on  the  oc 
casion  of  his  last  visit  to  Whitby  are  marked  posses 
sions. of  my  memory;  one  of  them  a  ramble  on  the 
warm,  wide  moors,  after  a  rough  lunch  at  a  little, 
stony  upland  inn,  in  company  charming  and  inti 
mate,  the  thought  of  which  to-day  is  a  reference  to 
a  double  loss ;  the  other  an  excursion,  made  partly 
by  a  longish  piece  of  railway,  in  his  society  alone,  to 


JAMES   RUSSELL   LOWELL  79 

Rievaulx  Abbey,  most  fragmentary,  but  most  grace 
ful,  of  ruins.  The  day  at  Rievaulx  was  as  exquisite 
as  I  could  have  wished  it  if  I  had  known  that  it  de 
noted  a  limit,  and  in  the  happy  absence  of  any  such 
revelation  altogether  given  up  to  adventure  and  suc 
cess.  I  remember  the  great  curving  green  terrace 
in  Lord  Feversham's  park  —  prodigious  and  surely 
unique ;  it  hangs  over  the  abbey  like  a  theatrical 
curtain  —  and  the  temples  of  concord,  or  whatever 
they  are,  at  either  end  of  it,  and  the  lovable  view, 
and  the  dear  little  dowdy  inn-parlor  at  Helmsley, 
where  there  is,  moreover,  a  massive  fragment  of  pro- 
faner  ruin,  a  bit  of  battered  old  castle,  in  the  grassy 
pr'eau  of  which  (it  was  a  perfect  English  picture)  a 
company  of  well-grown  young  Yorkshire  folk  of  both 
sexes  were  making  lawn-tennis  balls  fly  in  and  out  of 
the  past.  I  recall  with  vividness  the  very  waits  and 
changes  of  the  return  and  our  pleased  acceptance  of 
everything.  We  parted  on  the  morrow,  but  I  met 
Mr.  Lowell  a  little  later  in  Devonshire — O  clustered 
charms  of  Ottery ! — and  spent  three  days  in  his  com 
pany.  I  travelled  back  to  London  with  him,  and  saw 
him  for  the  last  time  at  Paddington.  He  was  to  sail 
immediately  for  America.  I  went  to  take  leave  of 
him,  but  I  missed  him,  and  a  day  or  two  later  he  was 
gone. 

I  note  these  particulars,  as  may  easily  be  imag 
ined,  wholly  for  their  reference  to  himself — for  the 
emphasized  occasion  they  give  to  remembrance  and 
regret.  Yet  even  remembrance  and  regret,  in  such  a 
case,  have  a  certain  free  relief,  for  our  final  thought 


80  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND   ELSEWHERE 

of  James  Russell  Lowell  is  that  what  he  consistently 
lived  for  remains  of  him.  There  is  nothing  ineffect 
ual  in  his  name  and  fame — they  stand  for  large  and 
delightful  things.  He  is  one  of  the  happy  figures  of 
literature.  He  had  his  trammels  and  his  sorrows, 
but  he  drank  deep  of  the  tonic  draught,  arid  he  will 
long  count  as  an  erect  fighting  figure  on  the  side  of 
optimism  and  beauty.  He  was  strong  without  nar 
rowness,  he  was  wise  without  bitterness  and  glad 
without  fatuity.  That  appears  for  the  most  part  the 
temper  of  those  who  speak  from  the  quiet  English 
heart,  the  steady  pulses  of  which  were  the  sufficient 
rhythm  of  his  eloquence.  This  source  of  influence 
will  surely  not  forfeit  its  long  credit  in  the  world  so 
long  as  we  continue  occasionally  to  know  it  by  what 
is  so  rich  in  performance  and  so  stainless  in  char 
acter. 

1891. 


FRANCES   ANNE    KEMBLE 

MRS.  KEMBLE  used  often  to  say  of  people  who  met 
her  during  the  later  years  of  her  life,  "  No  wonder 
they  were  surprised  and  bewildered,  poor  things — 
they  supposed  I  was  dead!"  Dying  January  i5th, 
1893,  in  her  eighty-third  year,  she  had  outlived  a 
whole  order  of  things,  her  "time,"  as  we  call  it,  and 
in  particular  so  many  of  her  near  contemporaries,  so 
many  relations  and  friends,  witnesses  and  admirers, 
so  much,  too,  of  her  own  robust  and  ironic  interest  in 
life,  that  the  event,  as  regards  attention  excited,  may 
well  be  said  to  have  introduced  her  to  unconscious 
generations.  To  that  little  group  of  the  faithful  for 
whom  she  had  represented  rare  things,  and  who  stood 
by  with  the  sense  of  an  emptier  and  vulgarer  world 
when,  at  Kensal  Green,  her  remains  were  laid  in  the 
same  earth  as  her  father's,  the  celebrity  of  an  age 
almost  antediluvian — to  these  united  few  the  form  in 
which  the  attention  I  speak  of  roused  itself  was  for 
the  most  part  a  strange  revelation  of  ignorance.  It 
was  in  so  many  cases — I  allude,  though  perhaps  I 
ought  not,  to  some  of  the  newspapers — also  a  revela 
tion  of  flippant  ill-nature  trying  to  pass  as  informa 
tion,  that  the  element  of  perplexity  was  added  to  the 
element  of  surprise.  Mrs.  Kemble  all  her  life  was 
6 


82  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

so  great  a  figure  for  those  who  were  not  in  ignorance, 
the  distinction  and  interest  of  her  character  were, 
among  them,  so  fundamental  an  article  of  faith,  that 
such  persons  were  startled  at  finding  themselves  called 
to  be,  not  combative  in  the  cause  of  her  innumerable 
strong  features  (they  were  used  to  that),  but  insistent 
in  respect  to  her  eminence.  No  common  attachment 
probably  ever  operated  as  a  more  genial  bond,  a  more 
immediate  password,  than  an  appreciation  of  this  ex 
traordinary  woman ;  so  that  inevitably,  to-day,  those 
who  had  the  privilege  in  the  evening  of  her  life  of 
knowing  her  better  will  have  expressed  to  each  other 
the  hope  for  some  commemoration  more  proportion 
ate.  The  testimony  of  such  of  them  as  might  have 
hesitated  will  certainly  in  the  event  have  found  itself 
singularly  quickened.  The  better  word  will  yet  be 
spoken,  and  indeed  if  it  should  drop  from  all  the  lips 
to  which  it  has  risen  with  a  rush,  Mrs.  Kemble's  fine 
memory  would  become  the  occasion  of  a  lively  liter 
ature.  She  was  an  admirable  subject  for  the  crystal 
lization  of  anecdote,  for  encompassing  legend.  If  we 
have  a  definite  after-life  in  the  amount  of  illustration 
that  may  gather  about  us,  few  vivid  names  ought  to 
fade  more  slowly. 

As  it  was  not,  however,  the  least  interesting  thing 
in  her  that  she  was  composed  of  contrasts  and  oppo- 
sites,  so  the  hand  that  should  attempt  a  living  por 
trait  would  be  conscious  of  some  conflicting  counsel. 
The  public  and  the  private  were  both  such  inevitable 
consequences  of  her  nature  that  we  take  perforce  into 
account  the  difficulty  of  reconciling  one  with  the  other. 


FRANCES   ANNE   KEMBLE  83 

If  she  had  had  no  public  hour  there  would  have 
been  so  much  less  to  admire  her  for ;  and  if  she  had 
not  hated  invasion  and  worldly  noise  we  should  not 
have  measured  her  disinterestedness  and  her  noble 
indifference.  A  prouder  nature  never  affronted  the 
long  humiliation  of  life,  and  to  few  persons  can  it 
have  mattered  less  on  the  whole  how  either  before  or 
after  death  the  judgment  of  men  was  likely  to  sound. 
She  had  encountered  publicity  as  she  had  encoun 
tered  bad  weather ;  but  the  public,  on  these  occa 
sions,  was  much  more  aware  of  her,  I  think,  than  she 
was  aware  of  the  public.  With  her  immense  sense 
of  comedy  she  would  have  been  amused  at  being  vin 
dicated,  and  leaving  criticism  far  behind,  would  have 
contributed  magnificent  laughable  touches — in  the 
wonderful  tone  in  which  she  used  to  read  her  Falstaff 
or  even  her  Mrs.  Quickly — to  any  picture  of  her  pe 
culiarities.  She  talked  of  herself  in  unreserved  verses, 
in  published  records  and  reminiscences ;  but  this  over 
flow  of  her  conversation,  for  it  was  nothing  more,  was 
no  more  directed  at  an  audience  than  a  rural  pedes 
trian's  humming  of  a  tune.  She  talked  as  she  went, 
from  wealth  of  animal  spirits.  She  had  a  reason  for 
everything  she  did  (not  always,  perhaps,  a  good  one), 
but  the  last  reason  she  would  have  given  for  writing 
her  books  was  the  desire  to  see  if  people  would  read 
them.  Her  attitude  towards  publication  was  as  little 
like  the  usual  attitude  in  such  a  matter  as  possible 
— which  was  true  indeed  of  almost  any  relation  in 
which  she  happened  to  find  herself  to  any  subject. 
Therefore  if  it  is  impossible  to  say  for  her  how  large 


84  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND   ELSEWHERE 

she  was  without  going  into  the  details,  we  may  re 
member  both  her  own  aloofness  and  her  own  spon 
taneity,  and  above  all,  that  every  impulse  to  catch 
her  image  before  it  melts  away  is  but  a  natural  echo 
of  her  presence.  That  intense  presence  simply  con 
tinues  to  impose  itself. 

Not  the  least  of  the  sources  of  its  impressiveness 
in  her  later  years  was  the  historic  value  attached  to 
it — its  long  backward  reach  into  time.  Even  if  Mrs. 
Kemble  had  been  a  less  remarkable  person  she  would 
have  owed  a  distinction  to  the  far-away  past  to  which 
she  gave  continuity,  would  have  been  interesting  from 
the  curious  contacts  she  was  able,  as  it  were,  to  trans 
mit.  She  made  us  touch  her  aunt  Mrs.  Siddons,  and 
whom  does  Mrs.  Siddons  not  make  us  touch  ?  She 
had  sat  to  Sir  Thomas  Lawrence  for  her  portrait,  and 
Sir  Thomas  Lawrence  was  in  love  with  Sir  Joshua's 
Tragic  Muse.  She  had  breakfasted  with  Sir  Walter 
Scott,  she  had  sung  with  Tom  Moore,  she  had  list 
ened  to  Edmund  Kean  and  to  Mademoiselle  Mars. 
These  things  represented  a  privilege  of  which  the 
intensity  grew  with  successive  years,  with  the  growth 
of  a  modernness  in  which  she  found  herself — not  in 
the  least  plaintively  indeed — expatriated.  The  case 
was  the  more  interesting  that  the  woman  herself  was 
deeply  so ;  relics  are  apt  to  be  dead,  and  Mrs.  Kem 
ble,  for  all  her  antecedents,  was  a  force  long  unspent. 
She  could  communicate  the  thrill  if  her  auditor  could 
receive  it ;  the  want  of  vibration  was  much  more  like 
ly  to  be  in  the  auditor.  She  had  been,  in  short,  a 
celebrity  in  the  twenties,  had  attracted  the  town  while 


FRANCES    ANNE    KEMBLE  85 

the  century  was  still  almost  as  immature  as  herself. 
The  great  thing  was  that  from  the  first  she  had  abun 
dantly  lived  and,  in  more  than  one  meaning  of  the 
word,  acted — felt,  observed,  imagined,  reflected,  rea 
soned,  gathered  in  her  passage  the  abiding  impres 
sion,  the  sense  and  suggestion  of  things.  That  she 
was  the  last  of  the  greater  Kembles  could  never  be  a 
matter  of  indifference,  even  to  those  of  her  friends 
who  had  reasons  less  abstract  for  being  fond  of  her ; 
and  it  was  a  part  of  her  great  range  and  the  immense 
variety  of  the  gifts  by  which  she  held  attention,  whisked 
it  from  one  kind  of  subjugation  to  another,  that  the 
"  town "  she  had  astonished  in  her  twentieth  year 
was,  for  the  London-lover,  exactly  the  veritable  town, 
that  of  the  old  books  and  prints,  the  old  legends  and 
landmarks.  Her  own  love  for  London,  like  her  en 
durance  of  Paris,  was  small ;  she  treated  her  birth 
place  at  best — it  was  the  way  she  treated  many  things 
— as  an  alternative  that  would  have  been  impossible 
if  she  had  cared ;  but  the  great  city  had  laid  its  hand 
upon  her  from  the  first  (she  was  born  in  that  New 
man  Street  which  had  a  later  renown,  attested  by 
Thackeray,  as  the  haunt  of  art-students  and  one  of 
the  boundaries  of  Bohemia),  playing  a  large  part  in 
her  mingled  experience  and  folding  her  latest  life  in 
an  embrace  which  could  be  grandmotherly  even  for 
old  age. 

She  had  figured  in  the  old  London  world,  which 
lived  again  in  her  talk  and,  to  a  great  degree,  in  her 
habits  and  standards  and  tone.  This  background, 
embroidered  with  her  theatrical  past,  so  unassimi- 


86  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

lated,  but  so  vivid  in  her  handsome  hereditary  head 
and  the  unflagging  drama  of  her  manner,  was  helped 
by  her  agitated,  unsettled  life  to  make  her  what  I 
have  called  historic.  If  her  last  twenty  years  were 
years  of  rest,  it  was  impossible  for  an  observer  of 
them  not  to  feel  from  how  many  things  she  was  rest 
ing — from  how  long  a  journey  and  how  untempered 
a  fate,  what  an  expenditure  of  that  rich  personal 
ity  which  always  moved  all  together  and  with  all 
its  violent  force.  Whatever  it  was,  at  any  rate,  this 
extraordinary  mixture  of  incongruous  things,  of  Eng 
land  and  France  in  her  blood,  of  America  and  Eng 
land  in  her  relationships,  of  the  footlights  and  the 
glaciers  in  her  activity,  of  conformity  and  contumacy 
in  her  character,  and  tragedy  and  comedy  in  her  talk 
— whatever  it  was,  there  was  always  this  strangeness 
and  this  amusement  for  the  fancy,  that  the  beginning 
of  it  had  been  anything  'so  disconnected  as  the  elder 
Covent  Garden,  the  Covent  Garden  of  Edmund  Kean 
(I  find  his  name  on  a  playbill  of  the  year  of  her  first 
appearance),  and  a  tremendous  success  as  Juliet  in 
1829.  There  was  no  convenient  and  handy  formula 
for  Mrs.  Kemble's  genius,  and  one  had  to  take  her 
career,  the  juxtaposition  of  her  interests,  exactly  as 
one  took  her  disposition,  for  a  remarkably  fine  clus 
ter  of  inconsistencies.  But  destiny  had  turned  her 
out  a  Kemble,  and  had  taken  for  granted  of  a  Kem- 
ble  certain  things — especially  a  theatre  and  a  tone ; 
in  this  manner  she  was  enabled  to  present  as  fine  an 
example  as  one  could  wish  of  submission  to  the  gen 
eral  law  at  the  sacrifice  of  every  approach,  not  to 


FRANCES   ANNE    KEMBLE  87 

freedom,  which  she  never  could  forego,  but  to  the 
superficial  symmetry  that  enables  critics  to  classify. 
This  facility  her  friends  enjoyed  with  her  as  little  as 
they  enjoyed  some  others ;  but  it  was  a  small  draw 
back  in  the  perception  of  that  variety,  the  result  of 
many  endowments,  which  made  other  company  by 
contrast  alarmingly  dull  and  yet  left  one  always  un 
der  the  final  impression  of  her  sincerity.  It  was  her 
character,  in  its  generosity  and  sincerity,  that  was 
simple ;  it  was  her  great  gifts  and  her  intelligence 
that  banished  the  insular  from  her  attitude  and  even, 
with  her  rich  vein  of  comedy,  made  a  temptation  for 
her  of  the  bewilderment  of  the  simple. 

Since  it  was  indeed,  however,  as  the  daughter  of 
the  Kembles,  the  histrionic  figure,  the  far-away  girl 
ish  Juliet  and  Julia,  that  the  world  primarily  regarded 
her  and  that  her  admirably  mobile  face  and  expres 
sive  though  not  effusive  manner  seemed,  with  how 
ever  little  intention,  to  present  her,  this  side  of  her 
existence  should  doubtless  be  disposed  of  at  the  out 
set  of  any  attempted  sketch  of  her,  even  should  such 
a  sketch  be  confined  by  limits  permitting  not  the 
least  minuteness.  She  left  it  behind  her  altogether 
as  she  went,  very  early  in  life  indeed,  but  her  prac 
tice  of  theatrical  things  is  a  point  the  more  interest 
ing  as  it  threw  a  strong  light  not  only  on  many  of 
those  things  themselves,  but  on  the  nature  of  her 
remarkable  mind.  No  such  mind  and  no  such  char 
acter  were  surely  in  any  other  case  concerned  with 
them.  Besides  having  an  extreme  understanding  of 
them,  she  had  an  understanding  wholly  outside  of 


88  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

them  and  larger  than  any  place  they  can  fill ;  and  if 
she  came  back  to  them  in  tone,  in  reminiscence,  in 
criticism  (she  was  susceptible  to  playhouse  beguile- 
ment  to  her  very  latest  years),  it  was  a  return  from 
excursions  which  ought  logically  to  have  resulted  in 
alienation.  Nobody  connected  with  the  stage  could 
have  savored  less  of  the  "shop."  She  was  a  reac 
tionary  Kemble  enough,  but  if  she  got  rid  of  her 
profession  she  could  never  get  rid  of  her  instincts, 
which  kept  her  dramatic  long  after  she  ceased  to  be 
theatrical.  They  existed  in  her,  as  her  unsurpassable 
voice  and  facial  play  existed,  independently  of  ambi 
tion  or  cultivation,  of  disenchantment  or  indifference. 
She  never  ceased  to  be  amusing  on  the  subject  of 
that  vivid  face  which  was  so  much  more  scenic  than 
she  intended,  and  always  declined  to  be  responsible 
for  her  manner,  her  accents,  her  eyes.  These  things, 
apart  from  family  ties,  were  her  only  link  with  the 
stage,  which  she  had  from  the  first  disliked  too  much 
to  have  anything  so  submissive  as  a  taste  about  it. 
It  was  a  convenience  for  her  which  heredity  made 
immediate,  just  as  it  was  a  convenience  to  write,  off 
hand,  the  most  entertaining  books,  which  from  the 
day  they  went  to  the  publisher  she  never  thought  of 
again  nor  listened  to  a  word  about ;  books  inspired 
by  her  spirits,  really,  the  high  spirits  and  the  low,  by 
her  vitality,  her  love  of  utterance  and  of  letters,  her 
natural  positiveness.  She  took  conveniences  for 
granted  in  life,  and,  full  %as  she  was  of  ideas  and 
habits,  hated  pretensions  about  personal  things  and 
fine  names  for  plain  ones.  There  never  was  any 


FRANCES   ANNE    KEMBLE  89 

felicity  in  approaching  her  on  the  ground  of  her  writ 
ings,  or  indeed  in  attempting  to  deal  with  her  as  a 
woman  professedly  "intellectual,"  a  word  that,  in 
her  horror  of  coteries  and  current  phrases,  she  always 
laughed  to  scorn. 

All  these  repudiations  together,  however,  didn't 
alter  the  fact  that  when  the  author  of  these  pages 
was  a  very  small  boy  the  reverberation  of  her  first 
visit  to  the  United  States,  though  it  had  occurred 
years  before,  was  still  in  the  air  :  I  allude  to  the 
visit  of  1832,  with  her  father,  of  which  her  first 
"Journal,"  published  in  1835,  is  so  curious,  so 
amusing,  and,  with  its  singular  testimony  to  the  taste 
of  the  hour,  so  living  a  specimen.  This  early  book, 
by  the  way,  still  one  of  the  freshest  pictures  of  what 
is  called  a  "brilliant  girl"  that  our  literature  pos 
sesses,  justifies  wonderfully,  with  its  spontaneity  and 
gayety,  the  sense  it  gives  of  variety  and  vitality,  of 
easy  powers  and  overtopping  spirits,  the  great  com 
motion  she  produced  in  her  youth.  Marie  Bashkirt- 
seff  was  in  the  bosom  of  the  future,  but  as  a  girlish 
personality  she  had  certainly  been  anticipated  ;  in 
addition  to  which  it  may  be  said  that  a  comparison 
of  the  two  diaries  would  doubtless  lead  to  considera 
tions  enough  on  the  difference  between  health  and 
disease.  However  this  may  be,  one  of  the  earliest 
things  that  I  remember  with  any  vividness  is  a  drive 
in  the  country,  near  New  York,  in  the  course  of 
which  the  carriage  passed  a  lady  on  horseback  who 
had  stopped  to  address  herself  with  some  vivacity 
to  certain  men  at  work  by  the  road.  Just  as  we  had 


90  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

got  further  one  of  my  elders  exclaimed  to  the  other, 
"  Why,  it's  Fanny  Kemble  !"  and  on  my  inquiring 
who  was  the  bearer  of  this  name,  which  fell  upon 
my  ear  for  the  first  time,  I  was  informed  that  she 
was  a  celebrated  actress.  It  was  added,  I  think, 
that  she  was  a  brilliant  reader  of  Shakespeare, 
though  I  am  not  certain  that  the  incident  occurred 
after  she  had  begun  her  career  of  reading.  The 
American  cities,  at  any  rate,  were  promptly  filled 
with  the  glory  of  this  career,  so  that  there  was  a 
chance  for  me  to  be  vaguely  perplexed  as  to  the 
bearing  on  the  performance,  which  I  heard  con 
stantly  alluded  to,  of  her  equestrian  element,  so  large 
a  part  of  her  youth.  Did  she  read  on  horseback,  or 
was  her  acting  one  of  the  attractions  of  the  circus  ? 
There  had  been  something  in  the  circumstances 
(perhaps  the  first  sight  of  a  living  Amazon — an  ap 
parition  comparatively  rare  then  in  American  sub 
urbs)  to  keep  me  from  forgetting  the  lady,  about 
whom  gathered  still  other  legends  than  the  glamour 
of  the  theatre  ;  at  all  events  she  was  planted  from 
that  moment  so  firmly  in  my  mind  that  when,  as  a 
more  developed  youngster,  after  an  interval  of  several 
years,  I  was  taken  for  education's  sake  to  hear  her, 
the  occasion  was  primarily  a  relief  to  long  suspense. 
It  became,  however,  and  there  was  another  that  fol 
lowed  it,  a  joy  by  itself  and  an  impression  inefface 
able. 

This  was  in  London,  and  I  remember  even  from 
such  a  distance  of  time  every  detail  of  the  picture 
and  every  tone  of  her  voice.  The  two  readings — 


FRANCES   ANNE    KEMBLE  QI 

one  was  of  King  Lear,  the  other  of  A  Midsummer- 
Night's  Dream  —  took  place  in  certain  Assembly 
Rooms  in  St.  John's  Wood,  which,  in  immediate  con 
tiguity  to  the  Eyre  Arms  tavern,  appear  still  to  exist, 
and  which,  as  I  sometimes  pass,  I  even  yet  never 
catch  a  glimpse  of  without  a  faint  return  of  the 
wonder  and  the  thrill.  The  choice  of  the  place,  then 
a  "  local  centre,"  shows  how  London  ways  have  al 
tered.  The  reader  dressed  in  black  velvet  for  Lear 
and  in  white  satin  for  the  comedy,  and  presented 
herself  to  my  young  vision  as  a  being  of  formidable 
splendor.  I  must  have  measured  in  some  degree 
the  power  and  beauty  of  her  performance,  for  I  per 
fectly  recall  the  sense  of  irreparable  privation  with 
which  a  little  later  I  heard  my  parents  describe  the 
emotion  produced  by  her  Othello,  given  at  the  old 
Hanover  Square  Rooms  and  to  which  I  had  not 
been  conducted.  I  have  seen  both  the  tragedy  and 
the  "  Dream  "  acted  several  times  since  then,  but  I 
have  always  found  myself  waiting  vainly  for  any 
approach  to  the  splendid  volume  of  Mrs.  Kemble's 
"  Howl,  howl,  howl !  "  in  the  one,  or  to  the  anima 
tion  and  variety  that  she  contributed  to  the  other. 
I  am  confident  that  the  most  exquisite  of  fairy-tales 
never  was  such  a  "  spectacle  "  as  when  she  read,  I 
was  going  to  say  mounted,  it.  Is  this  reminiscence 
of  the  human  thunder-roll  that  she  produced  in  Lear 
in  some  degree  one  of  the  indulgences  with  which 

o  o 

we  treat  our  childhood  ?  I  think  not,  in  the  light 
of  innumerable  subsequent  impressions.  These 
showed  that  the  force  and  the  imagination  were 


92  ESSAYS   IN   LONDON   AND   ELSEWHERE 

still  there ;  why  then  should  they  not,  in  the  prime 
of  their  magnificent  energy,  have  borne  their  fruit  ? 
The  former  of  the  two  qualities,  leaving  all  the 
others,  those  of  intention  and  discrimination,  out  of 
account,  sufficed  by  itself  to  excite  the  astonishment 
of  a  genius  no  less  energetic  than  Madame  Ristori, 
after  she  had  tasted  for  a  couple  of  hours  of  the  life 
that  Mrs.  Kemble's  single  personality  could  impart 
to  a  Shakespearean  multitude.  "  Che  forza,  ma  che 
forza,  che  forza !  "  she  kept  repeating,  regarding  it 
simply  as  a  feat  of  power. 

It  is  always  a  torment  to  the  later  friends  of  the 
possessor  of  a  great  talent  to  have  to  content  them 
selves  with  the  supposition  and  the  hearsay  ;  but  in 
Mrs.  Kemble's  society  there  were  precious  though 
casual  consolations  for  the  treacheries  of  time.  She 
was  so  saturated  with  Shakespeare  that  she  had 
made  him,  as  it  were,  the  air  she  lived  in,  an  air 
that  stirred  with  his  words  whenever  she  herself  was 
moved,  whenever  she  was  agitated  or  impressed,  re 
minded  or  challenged.  He  was  indeed  her  utterance, 
the  language  she  spoke  when  she  spoke  most  from 
herself.  He  had  said,  the  things  that  she  would 
have  wished  most  to  say,  and  it  was  her  greatest 
happiness,  I  think,  that  she  could  always  make  him 
her  obeisance  by  the  same  borrowed  words  that  ex 
pressed  her  emotion.  She  was  as  loyal  to  him  — 
and  it  is  saying  not  a  little  —  as  she  was  to  those 
most  uplifted  Alps  which  gave  her  the  greater  part 
of  the  rest  of  her  happiness  and  to  which  she  paid 
her  annual  reverence  with  an  inveteracy,  intensely 


FRANCES   ANNE    KEMBLE  93 

characteristic,  that  neither  public  nor  private  commo 
tions,  neither  revolutions  nor  quarantines,  neither  war 
nor  pestilence  nor  floods,  could  disconcert.  There 
fore  one  came  in  for  many  windfalls,  for  echoes 
and  refrains,  for  snatches  of  speeches  and  scenes. 
These  things  were  unfailing  illustrations  of  the  great 
luxury  one  had  been  born  to  miss.  Moreover,  there 
were  other  chances — the  chances  of  anecdote,  of  as 
sociation,  and  that,  above  all,  of  her  company  at 
the  theatre,  or  rather  on  the  return  from  the  the 
atre,  to  which  she  often  went,  occasions  when,  on 
getting,  after  an  interval  of  profound  silence,  to 
a  distance  —  never  till  then  —  some  train  of  quo 
tation  and  comparison  was  kindled.  As  all  roads 
lead  to  Rome,  so  all  humor  and  all  pathos,  all 
quotation,  all  conversation,  it  may  be  said,  led  for 
Mrs.  Kemble  to  the  poet  she  delighted  in  and  for 
whose  glory  it  was  an  advantage  —  one's  respect 
needn't  prevent  one  from  adding  —  that  she  was  so 
great  a  talker. 

Twice  again,  after  these  juvenile  evenings  I  have 
permitted  myself  to  recall,  I  had  the  opportunity  of 
hearing  her  read  whole  plays.  This  she  did  repeat 
edly,  though  she  had  quitted  public  life,  in  one  or 
two  American  cities  after  the  civil  war ,  she  had 
never  been  backward  in  lending  such  aid  to  "  ap 
peals,"  to  charitable  causes,  and  she  had  a  sort  of 
American  patriotism,  a  strange  and  conditioned  sen 
timent  of  which  there  is  more  to  be  said,  a  love  for 
the  United  States  which  was  a  totally  different  mat 
ter  from  a  liking,  and  which,  from  1861  to  1865, 


94  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

made  her  throb  with  American  passions.  She  re 
turned  to  her  work  to  help  profusely  the  Sanitary 
Commission  or  some  other  deserving  enterprise  that 
was  a  heritage  of  the  war-time.  One  of  the  plays  I 
speak  of  in  this  connection  was  The  Merchant  of 
Venice,  the  other  was  Henry  V.  No  Portia  was  so 
noble  and  subtle  as  that  full-toned  Portia  of  hers  — 
such  a  picturesque  great  lady,  such  a  princess  of 
poetry  and  comedy.  This  circumstance  received 
further  light  on  an  occasion  —  years  afterwards,  in 
London  —  of  my  going  to  see  the  play  with  her.  If 
the  performance  had  been  Shakespearean  there  was 
always  an  epilogue  that  was  the  real  interest  of  the 
evening — a  beautiful  rally,  often  an  exquisite  protest, 
of  all  her  own  instinct,  in  the  brougham,  in  the 
Strand,  in  the  Brompton  Road.  Those  who  some 
times  went  with  her  to  the  play  in  the  last  years  of 
her  life  will  remember  the  Juliets,  the  Beatrices,  the 
Rosalinds  whom  she  could  still  make  vivid  without 
an  accessory  except  the  surrounding  London  uproar. 
There  was  a  Beatrice  in  particular,  one  evening,  who 
seemed  to  have  stepped  with  us  into  the  carriage  in 
pursuance  of  her  demonstration  that  this  charming 
creature,  all  rapidity  and  resonance  of  wit,  should 
ring  like  a  silver  bell.  We  might  have  been  to  the 
French  comedy — the  sequel  was  only  the  more  inter 
esting,  for,  with  her  love  of  tongues  and  her  ease  in 
dealing  with  them,  her  gift  of  tone  was  not  so  poor  a 
thing  as  to  be  limited  to  her  own  language.  Her 
own  language  indeed  was  a  plural  number ;  French 
rose  to  her  lips  as  quickly  and  as  racily  as  English, 


FRANCES   ANNE    KEMBLE  95 

and  corresponded  to  the  strong  strain  she  owed  to 
the  foreignness  of  her  remarkable  mother,  a  person 
as  to  whom,  among  the  many  persons  who  lived  in 
her  retrospects,  it  was  impossible,  in  her  company, 
not  to  feel  the  liveliest  curiosity  ;  so  natural  was  it 
to  be  convinced  of  the  distinction  of  the  far-away 
lady  whose  easy  gift  to  the  world  had  been  two  such 
daughters  as  Fanny  Kemble  and  Adelaide  Sartoris. 
There  were  indeed  friends  of  these  brilliant  women 
— all  their  friends  of  alien  birth,  it  may  be  said,  and 
the  list  was  long — who  were  conscious  of  a  very 
direct  indebtedness  to  the  clever  and  continental 
Mrs.  Charles  Kemble,  an  artist,  recordedly,  and  a 
character.  She  had  in  advance  enlarged  the  situa 
tion,  multiplied  the  elements,  contributed  space  and 
air.  Had  she  not  notably  interposed  in  the  interest 
of  that  facility  of  intercourse  to  which  nothing  min 
isters  so  much  as  an  imagination  for  the  difference 
of  human  races  and  the  variety  of  human  condi 
tions  ? 

This  imagination  Mrs.  Kemble,  as  was  even  more 
the  case  with  her  eminent  sister,  had  in  abundance ; 
her  conversation  jumped  gayly  the  Chinese  wall,  and 
if  she  "  didn't  like  foreigners  "  it  was  not,  as  many 
persons  can  attest,  because  she  didn't  understand 
them.  She  declared  of  herself,  freely — no  faculty  for 
self-derision  was  ever  richer  or  droller — that  she  was 
not  only  intensely  English,  but  the  model  of  the  Brit 
ish  Philistine.  She  knew  what  she  meant,  and  so  as 
suredly  did  her  friends ;  but  somehow  the  statement 
was  always  made  in  French ;  it  took  her  foreignness 


96  ESSAYS   IN   LONDON  AND   ELSEWHERE 

to  support  it :  "  Ah,  vous  savez,  je  suis  Anglaise,  mot 
— la  plus  Anglaise  des  Anglaises ! "  That  happily 
didn't  prevent  the  voice  of  Mademoiselle  Mars  from 
being  still  in  her  ear,  nor,  more  importunately  yet, 
the  voice  of  the  great  Rachel,  nor  deprive  her  of  the 
ability  to  awaken  these  wonderful  echoes.  Her  mem 
ory  was  full  of  the  great  speeches  of  the  old  French 
drama,  and  it  was  in  her  power  especially  to  console, 
in  free  glimpses,  those  of  her  interlocutors  who  lan 
guished  under  the  sorrow  of  having  come  too  late 
for  Camille  and  Hermione.  The  moment  at  which, 
however,  she  remembered  Rachel's  deep  voice  most 
gratefully  was  that  of  a  certain  grave  "  Bien,  trls 
bien  /"  dropped  by  it  during  a  private  performance  of 
The  Hunchback,  for  a  charity,  at  Bridgewater  House,  I 
think,  when  the  great  actress,  a  spectator,  happened  to 
be  seated  close  to  the  stage,  and  the  Julia,  after  one 
of  her  finest  moments,  caught  the  words.  She  could 
repeat,  moreover,  not  only  the  classic  tirades,  but 
all  sorts  of  drolleries,  couplets  and  prose,  from  long- 
superseded  vaudevilles  —  witness  Grassot's  shriek, 
"Approchez-vouz  plus  loin!"  as  the  scandalized  daugh 
ter  of  Albion  in  Les  Anglaises  pour  Rire.  I  scarcely 
know  whether  to  speak  or  to  be  silent — in  connection 
with  such  remembrances  of  my  own  —  on  the  subject 
of  a  strange  and  sad  attempt,  one  evening,  to  sit 
through  a  performance  of  The  Hunchback,  a  play  in 
which,  in  her  girlhood,  she  had  been,  and  so  trium 
phantly,  the  first  representative  of  the  heroine,  and 
which,  oddly  enough,  she  had  never  seen  from  "in 
front."  She  had  gone,  reluctantly  and  sceptically, 


FRANCES    ANNE    KEMBLE  97 

only  because  something  else  that  had  been  planned 
had  failed  at  the  last,  and  the  sense  of  responsibility 
became  acute  on  her  companion's  part  when,  after 
the  performance  had  begun,  he  perceived  the  turn 
the  affair  was  likely  to  take.  It  was  a  vulgar  and 
detestable  rendering,  and  the  distress  of  it  became 
greater  than  could  have  been  feared  :  it  brought  back 
across  the  gulf  of  years  her  different  youth  and  all 
the  ghosts  of  the  dead,  the  first  interpreters  —  her  fa 
ther,  Charles  Kemble,  the  Sir  Thomas  Clifford,  Sheri 
dan  Knowles  himself,  the  Master  Walter,  the  van 
ished  Helen,  the  vanished  Modus  :  they  seemed,  in 
the  cold,  half-empty  house  and  before  the  tones  of 
their  successors,  to  interpose  a  mute  reproach — a  re 
proach  that  looked  intensely  enough  out  of  her  eyes 
when  at  last,  under  her  breath,  she  turned  to  her  em 
barrassed  neighbor  with  a  tragic,  an  unforgettable 
"  How  could  you  bring  me  to  see  this  thing  ?" 

I  have  mentioned  that  Henry  V.  was  the  last  play 
I  heard  her  read  in  public,  and  I  remember  a  dec 
laration  of  hers  that  it  was  the  play  she  loved  best 
to  read,  better  even  than  those  that  yielded  poetry 
more  various.  It  was  gallant  and  martial  and  in 
tensely  English,  and  she  was  certainly  on  such  even 
ings  the  "  Anglaise  des  Anglaises"  she  professed  to  be. 
Her  splendid  tones  and  her  face,  lighted  like  that  of  a 
war-goddess,  seemed  to  fill  the  performance  with  the 
hurry  of  armies  and  the  sound  of  battle  ;  as  in  her 
rendering  of  A  Midsummer -Nighfs  Dream,  so  the 
illusion  was  that  of  a  multitude  and  a  pageant.  I  re 
call  the  tremendous  ring  of  her  voice,  somewhat  di- 
7 


98  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

minished  as  it  then  was,  in  the  culminating  "  God  for 
Harry,  England,  and  Saint  George !"  a  voice  the  im 
mense  effect  of  which,  in  her  finest  years  —  the  oc 
casion,  for  instance,  of  her  brief  return  to  the  stage 
in  1847  — an  °ld  friend  just  illustrates  to  me  by  a 
reminiscence.  She  was  acting  at  that  period  at 
the  Princess's  Theatre,  with  Macready,  in  whom  my 
informant,  then  a  very  young  man  and  an  unfledged 
journalist,  remembers  himself  to  have  been,  for  some 
reason,  "surprisingly  disappointed."  It  all  seems 
very  ancient  history.  On  one  of  the  evenings  of  Mac 
beth  he  was  making  his  way,  by  invitation,  to  Douglas 
Jerrold's  box  —  Douglas  Jerrold  had  a  newspaper — 
when,  in  the  passage,  he  was  arrested  by  the  sense 
that  Mrs.  Kemble  was  already  on  the  stage,  reading 
the  letter  with  which  Lady  Macbeth  makes  her  en 
trance.  The  manner  in  which  she  read  it,  the  tone 
that  reached  his  ears,  held  him  motionless  and  spell 
bound  till  she  had  finished.  To  nothing  more  beauti 
ful  had  he  ever  listened,  nothing  more  beautiful  was 
he  ever  to  hear  again.  This  was  the  sort  of  impres 
sion  commemorated  in  Longfellow's  so  sincere  sonnet, 
"  Ah,  precious  evenings,  all  too  swiftly  sped  !"  Such 
evenings  for  the  reader  herself  sped  swiftly  as  well, 
no  doubt ;  but  they  proceeded  with  a  regularity  alto 
gether,  in  its  degree,  characteristic  of  her,  and  some 
of  the  rigidities  of  which  she  could  relate  with  a  droll 
ery  that  yielded  everything  but  the  particular  point. 
The  particular  point  she  never  yielded  —  she  only 
yielded  afterwards,  in  overwhelming  profusion,  some 
other  quite  different,  though  to  herself  possibly  much 


FRANCES   ANNE    KEMBLE  99 

more  inconvenient  one :  a  characteristic  of  an  order 
that  one  of  her  friends  probably  had  in  mind  in  de 
claring  that  to  have  a  difference  with  her  was  a  much 
less  formidable  thing  than  to  make  it  up. 

Her  manner  of  dealing  with  her  readings  was  the 
despair  of  her  agents  and  managers,  whom  she  pro 
foundly  commiserated,  whom  she  vividly  imitated, 
and  who,  in  their  wildest  experience  of  the  "  tempera 
ment  of  genius  "  and  the  oddities  of  the  profession, 
had  never  encountered  her  idiosyncrasies.  It  threw, 
indeed,  the  strongest  light  upon  the  relation  in  which 
her  dramatic  talent,  and  the  faculty  that  in  a  different 
nature  one  would  call  as  a  matter  of  course  her  artis 
tic  sense  stood  to  the  rest  of  her  mind  ,  a  relation  in 
which  such  powers,  on  so  great  a  scale,  have  probably 
never  but  in  that  single  instance  found  themselves. 
On  the  artistic  question,  in  short,  she  was  unique ; 
she  disposed  of  it  by  a  summary  process.  In  other 
words,  she  would  none  of  it  at  all,  she  recognized  in  no 
degree  its  application  to  herself.  It  once  happened 
that  one  of  her  friends,  in  a  moment  of  extraordi 
nary  inadvertence,  permitted  himself  to  say  to  her  in 
some  argument,  "  Such  a  clever  woman  as  you  !"  He 
measured  the  depth  of  his  fall  when  she  challenged 
him  with  one  of  her  facial  flashes  and  a  "  How  dare 
you  call  me  anything  so  commonplace  ?"  This  could 
pass ;  but  no  one  could  have  had  the  temerity  to  tell 
her  she  was  an  artist.  The  chance  to  discriminate 
was  too  close  at  hand ;  if  she  was  an  artist,  what  name 
was  left  for  her  sister  Adelaide,  of  musical  fame,  who, 
with  an  histrionic  equipment  scarcely  inferior  to  her 


IOO  ESSAYS   IN   LONDON   AND   ELSEWHERE 

own,  lived  in  the  brightest  air  of  aesthetics?  Mrs. 
Kemble's  case  would  have  been  an  exquisite  one  for 
a  psychologist  interested  in  studying  the  constitution 
of  sincerity.  That  word  expresses  the  special  light 
by  which  she  worked,  though  it  doubtless  would  not 
have  solved  the  technical  problem  for  her  if  she  had 
not  had  the  good-fortune  to  be  a  Kemble.  She  was  a 
moralist  who  had  come  out  of  a  theatrical  nest,  and  if 
she  read  Shakespeare  in  public  it  was  very  much  be 
cause  she  loved  him,  loved  him  in  a  way  that  made  it 
odious  to  her  to  treat  him  so  commercially.  She  read 
straight  through  the  list  of  his  plays — those  that  con 
stituted  her  repertory,  offering  them  in  a  succession 
from  which  no  consideration  of  profit  or  loss  ever  in 
duced  her  to  depart.  Some  of  them  "  drew  "  more 
than  others,  The  Merchant  of  Venice  more  than  Meas 
ure  for  Measure,  As  You  Like  It  more  than  Coriolanus, 
and  to  these  her  men  of  business  vainly  tried  to  in 
duce  her  either  to  confine  herself  or  to  give  a  more 
frequent  place  :  her  answer  was  always  her  immutable 
order,  and  her  first  service  was  to  her  master.  If  on 
a  given  evening  the  play  didn't  fit  the  occasion,  so 
much  the  worse  for  the  occasion  :  she  had  spoken  for 
her  poet,  and  if  he  had  more  variety  than  the  "  public 
taste,"  this  was  only  to  his  honor. 

Like  all  passionate  workers,  Mrs.  Kemble  had  her 
own  convictions  about  the  public  taste,  and  those 
who  knew  her,  moreover,  couldn't  fail  to  be  acquaint 
ed  with  the  chapter  —  it  was  a  large  one  —  of  her 
superlative  Quixotisms.  During  her  American  visits, 
before  the  war,  she  would  never  read  in  the  Southern 


FRANCES   ANNE    KEMBLE  IOI 

States :  it  was  a  part  of  the  consistency  with  which 
she  disapproved  of  sources  of  payment  proceeding 
from  the  "peculiar  institution."  This  was  a  large 
field  of  gain  closed  to  her,  for  her  marriage  to  Mr. 
Butler,  her  residence  in  Georgia  and  the  events  which 
followed  it,  culminating  in  her  separation,  had  given 
her,  in  the  South,  a  conspicuity,  a  retentissement,  of 
the  kind  that  an  impresario  rejoices  in.  What  would 
have  been  precisely  insupportable  to  her  was  that 
people  should  come  not  for  Shakespeare  but  for 
Fanny  Kemble,  and  she  simply  did  everything  she 
could  to  prevent  it.  Comically  out  of  his  reckoning 
was  one  of  these  gentlemen  with  whom  she  once  hap 
pened  to  talk  of  a  young  French  actress  whose  Juliet, 
in  London,  had  just  been  a  nine  days'  wonder.  "  Sup 
pose,"  she  said,  with  derision,  "  that,  telle  que  vous  me 
voycz,  I  should  go  over  to  Paris  and  appear  as  Celi- 
mene !"  Mrs.  Kemble  had  not  forgotten  the  light  of 
speculation  kindled  in  her  interlocutor's  eye  as  he 
broke  out,  with  cautious  and  respectful  eagerness, 
"  You're  not,  by  chance — a — thinking  of  it,  madam  ?" 
The  only  thing  that,  during  these  busy  years,  she  had 
been  "  thinking  of "  was  the  genius  of  the  poet  it 
was  her  privilege  to  interpret,  in  whom  she  found  all 
greatness  and  beauty,  and  with  whom  for  so  long  she 
had  the  great  happiness  (except  her  passion  for  the 
Alps  the  only  really  secure  happiness  she  knew)  of 
living  in  daily  intimacy.  There  had  been  other  large 
rewards  which  would  have  been  thrice  as  large  for  a 
person  without  those  fine  perversities  that  one  honored 
even  while  one  smiled  at  them,  but  above  all  there 


102  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

had  been  that  one.  "  Think,"  she  often  said  in  later 
years,  "think,  if  you  please,  what  company  /"  It  be 
fell,  on  some  occasion  of  her  being  in  one  of  her  fre 
quent  and  admirable  narrative  moods,  that  a  friend 
was  sufficiently  addicted  to  the  perpetual  puzzle  of 
art  to  ask  her  what  preparation,  in  a  series  of  read 
ings,  what  degree  of  rehearsal,  as  it  were,  she  found 
necessary  for  performances  so  arduous  and  so  com 
plex.  "  Rehearsal  ?" — she  was,  with  all  the  good  faith 
in  the  world,  almost  scandalized  at  the  idea.  "  I  may 
have  read  over  the  play,  and  I  think  I  kept  myself 
quiet."  "  But  was  nothing  determined,  established 
in  advance  ?  weren't  your  lines  laid  down,  your  points 
fixed?"  This  was  an  inquiry  which  Mrs.  Kemble 
could  treat  with  all  the  gayety  of  her  irony,  and  in  the 
light  of  which  her  talent  exhibited  just  that  discon 
certing  wilfulness  I  have  already  spoken  of.  She 
would  have  been  a  capture  for  the  disputants  who 
pretend  that  the  actor's  emotion  must  be  real,  if  she 
had  not  been  indeed,  with  her  hatred  both  of  enrol 
ment  and  of  tea-party  aesthetics,  too  dangerous  a  re 
cruit  for  any  camp.  Priggishness  and  pedantry  ex 
cited  her  ire ;  woe  therefore  to  those  who  collectively 
might  have  presumed  she  was  on  their  "  side." 

She  was  artistically,  I  think,  a  very  fine  anomaly, 
and,  in  relation  to  the  efficacity  of  what  may  be  called 
the  natural  method,  the  operation  of  pure  sincerity, 
a  witness  no  less  interesting  than  unconscious.  An 
equally  active  and  fruitful  love  of  beauty  was  prob 
ably  never  accompanied  with  so  little  technical  curi 
osity.  Her  endowment  was  so  rich,  her  spirit  so 


FRANCES  ANNE  KEMBLE  103 

proud,  her  temper  so  high,  that,  as  she  was  an  im 
mense  success,  they  made  her  indifference  and  her 
eccentricity  magnificent.  From  what  she  would  have 
been  as  a  failure  the  imagination  averts  its  face ,  and 
if  her  only  receipt  for  "  rendering  "  Shakespeare  was 
to  live  with  him  and  try  to  be  worthy  of  him,  there 
are  many  aspirants  it  would  not  have  taken  far  on  the 
way.  Nor  would  one  have  expected  it  to  be  the  pre 
cursor  of  performances  masterly  in  their  finish.  Such 
simplicities  were  easy  to  a  person  who  had  Mrs. 
Kemble's  organ,  her  presence,  and  her  rare  percep 
tions.  I  remember  going  many  years  ago,  in  the 
United  States,  to  call  on  her  in  company  with  a  lady 
who  had  borrowed  from  her  a  volume  containing  one 
of  Calderon's  plays  translated  by  Edward  Fitzgerald. 
This  lady  had  brought  the  book  back,  and  knowing 
her  sufficiently  well  (if  not  sufficiently  ill !)  to  venture 
to  be  pressing,  expressed  her  desire  that  she  should 
read  us  one  of  the  great  Spaniard's  finest  passages. 
Mrs.  Kemble,  giving  reasons,  demurred,  but  finally 
suffered  herself  to  be  persuaded.  The  scene  struck 
me  at  the  time,  I  remember,  as  a  reproduction  of 
some  anecdotic  picture  I  had  carried  in  my  mind  of 
the  later  days  of  Mrs.  Siddons  —  Mrs.  Siddons  read 
ing  Milton  in  her  mob-cap  and  spectacles.  The 
sunny  drawing-room  in  the  country,  the  morning  fire, 
the  "  Berlin  wools  "  of  the  hostess  and  her  rich  old- 
English  quality,  which  always  counted  double  beyond 
the  seas,  seemed  in  a  manner  a  reconstitution,  com 
pleted,  if  I  am  not  mistaken,  by  the  presence  of  Sir 
Thomas  Lawrence's  magnificent  portrait  of  her  grand- 


104  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND   ELSEWHERE 

mother,  Mrs.  Roger  Kemble  —  "the  old  lioness  her 
self,"  as  he,  or  some  one  else,  had  called  her,  the 
mother  of  all  the  brood.  Mrs.  Kemble  read,  then,  as 
she  only  could  read,  and,  the  poetry  of  the  passage 
being  of  the  noblest,  with  such  rising  and  visible,  such 
extreme  and  increasing  emotion,  that  I  presently  be 
came  aware  of  her  having  suddenly  sought  refuge 
from  a  disaster  in  a  cry  of  resentment  at  the  pass  she 
had  been  brought  to,  and  in  letting  the  book  fly  from 
her  hand  and  hurtle  across  the  room.  All  her  "  art " 
was  in  the  incident. 

It  was  just  as  much  and  just  as  little  in  her  talk, 
scarcely  less  than  her  dramatic  faculty  a  part  of  her 
fine  endowment  and,  indeed,  scarcely  at  all  to  be 
distinguished  from  it.  Her  conversation  opened  its 
doors  wide  to  all  parts  of  her  mind,  and  all  expression, 
with  her,  was  singularly  direct  and  immediate.  Her 
great  natural  resources  put  a  premium,  as  it  were,  on 
expression,  so  that  there  might  even  have  been  ground 
for  wondering  to  what  exaggeration  it  would  have 
tended  had  not  such  perfect  genuineness  been  at  the 
root.  It  was  exactly  this  striking  natural  form,  the 
channel  open  to  it,  that  made  the  genuineness  so  un 
embarrassed.  Full  as  she  was,  in  reflection,  of  ele 
ments  that  might  have  excluded  each  other,  she  was 
at  the  same  time,  socially  and  in  action,  so  much  of 
one  piece,  as  the  phrase  is,  that  her  different  gifts 
were  literally  portions  of  each  other.  As  her  talk 
was  part  of  her  drama,  so,  as  I  have  intimated,  her 
writing  was  part  of  her  talk.  It  had  the  same  free 
sincerity  as  her  conversation,  and  an  equal  absence 


FRANCES   ANNE    KEMBLE  105 

of  that  quality  which  may  be  called  in  social  inter 
course  diplomacy  and  in  literature  preoccupation  or 
even  ambition  or  even  vanity.  It  cannot  often  have 
befallen  her  in  her  long  life  to  pronounce  the  great 
word  Culture — the  sort  of  term  she  invariably  looked 
at  askance ,  but  she  had  acted  in  the  studious  spirit 
without  knowing  that  it  had  so  fine  a  name.  She  had 
always  lived  with  books  and  had  the  habit  and,  as  it 
were,  the  hygiene  of  them  ;  never,  moreover  (as  a 
habit  would  not  have  been  hers  without  some  odd  in 
tensity),  laying  down  a  volume  that  she  had  begun,  or 
failing  to  read  any  that  was  sent  her  or  lent  her.  Her 
friends  were  often  witnesses  of  heroic,  of  monstrous 
feats  of  this  kind.  "  I  read  everything  that  is  given 
me,  except  the  newspaper  —  and  from  beginning  to 
end,"  she  was  wont  to  say  with  that  almost  touch 
ing  docility  with  which  so  many  of  her  rebellions 
were  lovably  underlaid.  There  was  something  of  the 
same  humility  in  her  fondness  for  being  read  to,  even 
by  persons  professing  no  proficiency  in  the  art  —  an 
attitude  indeed  that,  with  its  great  mistress  for  a  list 
ener,  was  the  only  discreet  one  to  be  assumed.  All 
this  had  left  her  equally  enriched  and  indifferent ,  she 
never  dreamed  of  being  a  woman  of  letters  —  her  wit 
and  her  wisdom  relieved  her  too  comfortably  of  such 
pretensions.  Her  various  books,  springing  in  every 
case  but  two  or  three  straight  from  the  real,  from  ex 
perience  ;  personal  and  natural,  humorous  and  elo 
quent,  interesting  as  her  character  and  her  life  were 
interesting,  have  all  her  irrepressible  spirit  or,  if  the 
word  be  admissible,  her  spiritedness.  The  term  is 


106  ESSAYS   IN   LONDON  AND   ELSEWHERE 

not  a  critical  one,  but  the  geniality  (in  the  Germanic 
sense)  of  her  temperament  makes  everything  she 
wrote  what  is  called  good  reading.  She  wrote  ex 
actly  as  she  talked,  observing,  asserting,  complaining, 
confiding,  contradicting,  crying  out  and  bounding  off, 
always  effectually  communicating.  Last,  not  least, 
she  uttered  with  her  pen  as  well  as  with  her  lips  the 
most  agreeable,  uncontemporary,  self-respecting  Eng 
lish,  as  idiomatic  as  possible  and  just  as  little  com 
mon.  There  were  friends  to  whom  she  was  absolutely 
precious,  with  a  preciousness  historic,  inexpressible, 
to  be  kept  under  glass,  as  one  of  the  rare  persons 
(how  many  of  her  peers  are  left  in  the  world?)  over 
whom  the  trail  of  the  newspaper  was  not.  I  never 
saw  a  newspaper  in  her  house,  nor  in  the  course  of 
many  years  heard  her  so  much  as  allude  to  one ;  and 
as  she  had  the  habit,  so  she  had  the  sense  (a  real 
touchstone  for  others)  of  English  undefiled.  French 
as  she  was,  she  hated  Gallicisms  in  the  one  language 
as  much  as  she  winced  at  Anglicisms  in  the  other,  and 
she  was  a  constant  proof  that  the  richest  colloquial 
humor  is  not  dependent  for  its  success  upon  slang, 
least  of  all  (as  this  is  a  matter  in  which  distance  gilds) 
upon  that  of  the  hour.  I  won't  say  that  her  lips  were 
not  occasionally  crossed  gracefully  enough  by  that  of 
1840.  Her  attitude  towards  Americanisms  may  be 
briefly  disposed  of — she  confounded  them  (when  she 
didn't  think,  as  she  mostly  did,  that  Americans  made 
too  many  phrases — then  she  was  impelled  to  be  scan 
dalous)  with  the  general  modern  madness  for  which 
the  newspaper  was  responsible. 


FRANCES   ANNE   KEMBLE  107 

Her  prose  and  her  poetical  writings  are  alike  un 
equal  ;  easily  the  best  of  the  former,  I  think,  are  the 
strong,  insistent,  one-sided  "  Journal  of  a  Residence  on 
a  Georgia  Plantation"  (the  most  valuable  account 
— and  as  a  report  of  strong  emotion  scarcely  less  val 
uable  from  its  element  of  parti-pns — of  impressions 
begotten  by  that  old  Southern  life  which  we  are  too 
apt  to  see  to-day  as  through  a  haze  of  Indian  sum 
mer),  and  the  copious  and  ever-delightful  "  Records  of 
a  Girlhood  "  and  "  Records  of  Later  Life,"  which  form 
together  one  of  the  most  animated  autobiographies  in 
the  language.  Her  poetry,  all  passionate  and  melan 
choly  and  less  prized,  I  think,  than  it  deserves,  is  per 
fectly  individual  and  really  lyrical.  Much  of  it  is  so 
off-hand  as  to  be  rough,  but  much  of  it  has  beauty  as 
well  as  reality,  such  beauty  as  to  make  one  ask  one's 
self  (and  the  question  recurs  in  turning  the  leaves  of 
almost  any  of  her  books)  whether  her  aptitude  for 
literary  expression  had  not  been  well  worth  her  treat 
ing  it  with  more  regard.  That  she  might  have  cared 
for  it  more  is  very  certain  —  only  as  certain,  however, 
as  it  is  doubtful  if  any  circumstances  could  have 
made  her  care.  You  can  neither  take  vanity  from 
those  who  have  it  nor  give  it  to  those  who  have  it 
not.  She  really  cared  only  for  things  higher  and  finer 
and  fuller  and  happier  than  the  shabby  compromises 
of  life,  and  the  polishing  of  a  few  verses  the  more  or 
the  less  would  never  have  given  her  the  illusion  of 
the  grand  style.  The  matter  comes  back,  moreover, 
to  the  terrible  question  of  "  art  ";  it  is  difficult  after  all 
to  see  where  art  can  be  squeezed  in  when  you  have 


IO8  ESSAYS   IN   LONDON  AND   ELSEWHERE 

such  a  quantity  of  nature.  Mrs.  Kemble  would  have 
said  that  she  had  all  of  hers  on  her  hands.  A  certain 
rude  justice  presides  over  our  affairs,  we  have  to  se 
lect  and  to  pay,  and  artists  in  general  are  rather  spare 
and  thrifty  folk.  They  give  up  for  their  security  a 
great  deal  that  Mrs.  Kemble  never  could  give  up ; 
security  was  her  dream,  but  it  remained  her  dream: 
practically  she  passed  her  days  in  peril.  What  she 
had  in  verse  was  not  only  the  lyric  impulse  but  the 
genuine  lyric  need ;  poetry,  for  her,  was  one  of  those 
moral  conveniences  of  which  I  have  spoken  and 
which  she  took  where  she  found  them.  She  made  a 
very  honest  use  of  it,  inasmuch  as  it  expressed  for 
her  what  nothing  else  could  express  —  the  inexpug 
nable,  the  fundamental,  the  boundless  and  generous 
sadness  which  lay  beneath  her  vitality,  beneath  her 
humor,  her  imagination,  her  talents,  her  violence  of 
will  and  integrity  of  health.  This  note  of  suffering, 
audible  to  the  last  and  pathetic,  as  the  prostrations 
of  strength  are  always  pathetic,  had  an  intensity  all 
its  own,  though  doubtless,  being  so  direct  and  unre 
lieved,  the  interest  and  even  the  surprise  of  it  were 
greatest  for  those  to  whom  she  was  personally  known. 
There  was  something  even  strangely  simple  in  that 
perpetuity  of  pain  which  the  finest  of  her  sonnets 
commemorate  and  which  was  like  the  distress  of  a 
nature  conscious  of  its  irremediable  exposure  and 
consciously  paying  for  it.  The  great  tempest  of  her 
life,  her  wholly  unprosperous  marriage,  had  created 
waves  of  feeling  which,  even  after  long  years,  refused 
to  be  stilled,  continued  to  gather  and  break. 


FRANCES    ANNE    KEMBLE  109 

Twice  only,  after  her  early  youth,  she  tried  the  sort 
of  experiment  that  is  supposed  most  effectually  to 
liberate  the  mind  from  the  sense  of  its  own  troubles 
— the  literary  imagination  of  the  troubles  of  others. 
She  published,  in  1863,  the  fine,  sombre,  poetical,  but 
unmanageable  play  called  An  English  Tragedy  (writ 
ten  many  years  previous) ;  and  at  the  age  of  eighty 
she,  for  the  first  time,  wrote  and  put  forth  a  short 
novel.  The  latter  of  these  productions,  "  Far  Away 
and  Long  Ago,"  shows  none  of  the  feebleness  of  age  ; 
and  besides  the  charm,  in  form,  of  its  old  decorous 
affiliation  (one  of  her  friends,  on  reading  it,  assured 
her  in  perfect  good  faith  that  she  wrote  for  all  the 
world  like  Walter  Scott),  it  is  a  twofold  example  of  an 
uncommon  felicity.  This  is,  on  the  one  hand,  to 
break  ground  in  a  new  manner  and  so  gracefully  at 
so  advanced  an  age  (did  any  one  else  ever  produce  a 
first  fiction  at  eighty  ?),  and  on  the  other,  to  revert 
successfully,  in  fancy,  to  associations  long  outlived. 
Interesting,  touching  must  the  book  inevitably  be, 
from  this  point  of  view,  to  American  readers.  There 
was  nothing  finer  in  Mrs.  Kemble's  fine  mind  than 
the  generous  justice  of  which  she  was  capable  (as  her 
knowledge  grew,  and  after  the  innocent  impertinences 
of  her  girlish  "  Journal  ")  to  the  country  in  which  she 
had,  from  the  first,  found  troops  of  friends  and  inter 
vals  of  peace  as  well  as  depths  of  disaster.  She  had 
a  mingled  feeling  and  a  sort  of  conscientious  strife 
about  it,  together  with  a  tendency  to  handle  it  as 
gently  with  one  side  of  her  nature  as  she  was  prompt 
ed  to  belabor  it  with  the  other.  The  United  States 


110  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON    AND    ELSEWHERE 

commended  themselves  to  her  liberal  opinions  as 
much  as  they  disconcerted  her  intensely  conservative 
taste ;  she  relished  every  obligation  to  them  but  that 
of  living  in  them ;  and  never  heard  them  eulogized 
without  uttering  her  reserves  or  abused  without 
speaking  her  admiration.  They  had  been  the  scene 
of  some  of  her  strongest  friendships,  and,  eventually, 
among  the  mountains  of  Massachusetts,  she  had  for 
many  years,  though  using  it  only  in  desultory  ways, 
enjoyed  the  least  occasional  of  her  homes.  Late  in 
life  she  looked  upon  this  region  as  an  Arcadia,  a 
happy  valley,  a  land  of  woods  and  waters  and  upright 
souls ;  and  in  the  light  of  this  tender  retrospect,  a 
memory  of  summer  days  and  loved  pastimes,  of  plen 
tiful  riding  and  fishing,  recounted  her  romantic  anec 
dote,  a  retarded  stroke  of  the  literary  clock  of  1840. 
An  English  Tragedy  seems  to  sound  from  a  still  ear 
lier  timepiece,  has  in  it  an  echo  of  the  great  Eliza 
bethans  she  cherished. 

Compromised  by  looseness  of  construction,  it  has 
nevertheless  such  beauty  and  pathos  as  to  make  us 
wonder  why,  v/ith  her  love  of  poetry  (which  she  wide 
ly  and  perpetually  quoted)  and  her  hereditary  habit 
of  the  theatre,  she  should  not  oftener  have  tried  her 
strong  hand  at  a  play.  This  reflection  is  particularly 
suggested  by  a  sallow  but  robust  pamphlet  which  lies 
before  me,  with  gilt  edges  and  "  Seventh  Edition-" 
stamped  in  large  letters  on  its  cover;  an  indication 
doubly  significant  in  connection  with  the  words 
"  Five  shillings  and  sixpence  "  (a  very  archaic  price 
for  the  form)  printed  at  the  bottom.  "  Miss  Fanny 


FRANCES   ANNE    KEMBLE  III 

Kemble's  Tragedy,"  Francis  the  First,  was  acted,  with 
limited  success  indeed,  in  the  spring  of  1832,  and 
afterwards  published  by  Mr.  John  Murray.  She  ap 
peared  herself,  incongruously,  at  the  age  of  twenty- 
three,  as  the  queen-mother,  Louisa  of  Savoy  (she 
acted  indeed  often  at  this  time  with  her  father  parts 
the  most  mature)  ;  and  the  short  life  of  the  play,  as  a 
performance,  does  not  seem  to  have  impaired  the  cir 
culation  of  the  book.  Much  ventilated  in  London 
lately  has  been  the  question  of  the  publication  of 
acted  plays ;  but  even  those  authors  who  have  hoped 
most  for  the  practice  have  probably  not  hoped  for 
seventh  editions.  It  was  to  some  purpose  that  she 
had  been  heard  to  describe  herself  as  having  been  in 
ancient  days  "  a  nasty  scribbling  girl."  I  know  not 
how  many  editions  were  attained  by  The  Star  of  Se 
ville,  her  other  youthful  drama,  which  I  have  not  en 
countered.  Laxity  in  the  formative  direction  is,  how 
ever,  the  weakness  that  this  species  of  composition 
least  brooks.  If  Mrs.  Kemble  brushed  by,  with  all 
respect,  the  preoccupation  of  "art,"  it  was  not  with 
out  understanding  that  the  form  in  question  is  simply, 
and  of  necessity,  all  art,  a  circumstance  that  is  at 
once  its  wealth  and  its  poverty.  Therefore  she  for 
bore  to  cultivate  it ;  and  as  for  the  spirit's  refuge,  the 
sovereign  remedy  of  evocation,  she  found  this  after 
all  in  her  deep  immersion  in  Shakespeare,  the  multi 
tude  of  whose  characters  she  could  so  intensely,  in 
theatrical  parlance,  create. 

Any  brief  account  of  a  character  so  copious,  a  life 
so  various,  is  foredoomed  to  appear  to  sin  by  omis- 


112  ESSAYS   IN   LONDON   AND   ELSEWHERE 

sions ;  and  any  attempt  at  coherence  is  purchased 
by  simplifications  unjust,  in  the  eyes  of  observers, 
according  to  the  phase  or  the  period  with  which 
such  observers  happen  to  have  been  in  contact. 
If,  as  an  injustice  less  positive  than  some  others, 
we  dwell,  in  speaking  to  unacquainted  readers,  on 
Mrs.  Kemble's  "  professional "  career,  we  seem  to 
leave  in  the  shade  the  other,  the  personal  interest 
that  she  had  for  an  immense  and  a  constantly  re 
newed  circle  and  a  whole  later  generation.  If  we 
hesitate  to  sacrifice  the  testimony  offered  by  her 
writings  to  the  vivacity  of  her  presence  in  the  world, 
we  are  (besides  taking  a  tone  that  she  never  her 
self  took)  in  danger  of  allotting  a  minor  place  to 
that  social  charm  and  more  immediate  empire  which 
might  have  been  held  in  themselves  to  confer  emi 
nence  and  lift  the  individual  reputation  into  the 
type.  These  certainly  were  qualities  of  the  private 
order ;  but  originality  is  a  question  of  degree,  and 
the  higher  degrees  carry  away  one  sort  of  barrier  as 
well  as  another.  It  is  vain  to  talk  of  Mrs.  Kemble 
at  all,  if  we  are  to  lack  assurance  in  saying,  for 
those  who  had  not  the  privilege  of  knowing  her  as 
well  as  for  those  who  had,  that  she  was  one  of 
the  rarest  of  women.  To  insist  upon  her  accom 
plishments  is  to  do  injustice  to  that  human  large 
ness  which  was  the  greatest  of  them  all,  the  one  by 
which  those  who  admired  her  most  knew  her  best. 
One  of  the  forms,  for  instance,  taken  by  the  loy 
alty  she  so  abundantly  inspired  was  an  ineradicable 
faith  in  her  being  one  of  the  first  and  most  origi- 


FRANCES   ANNE    KEMBLE  113 

nal  of  talkers.  To  that  the  remembering  listener 
returns  as  on  the  whole,  in  our  bridled  race,  the 
fullest  measure  and  the  brightest  proof.  Her  talk 
was  everything,  everything  that  she  was,  or  that 
her  interlocutor  could  happen  to  want ;  though,  in 
deed,  it  was  often  something  that  he  couldn't  pos 
sibly  have  happened  to  expect.  It  was  herself,  in 
a  word,  and  everything  else  at  the  same  time.  It 
may  well  have  never  been  better  than,  with  so  long 
a  past  to  flow  into  it,  during  the  greater  part  of 
the  last  twenty  years  of  her  life.  So  at  least  is  will 
ing  to  believe  the  author  of  these  scanted  reminis 
cences,  whose  memory  carries  him  back  to  Rome, 
the  ancient,  the  adored,  and  to  his  first  nearer  vi 
sion  of  the  celebrated  lady,  still  retaining  in  aspect 
so  much  that  had  made  her  admirably  handsome 
(including  the  marked  splendor  of  apparel),  as  she 
rolled,  in  the  golden  sunshine,  always  alone  in  her 
high  carriage,  through  Borghese  villas  and  round 
Pincian  hills.  This  expression  had,  after  a  short 
interval,  a  long  sequel  in  the  quiet  final  London 
time,  the  time  during  which  she  willingly  ceased  to 
wander  and  indulged  in  excursions  only  of  memory 
and  of  wit. 

These  years  of  rest  were  years  of  anecdote  and 
eloquence  and  commentary,  and  of  a  wonderful  many- 
hued  retrospective  lucidity.  Her  talk  reflected  a 
thousand  vanished  and  present  things ;  but  there 
were  those  of  her  friends  for  whom  its  value  was, 
as  I  have  hinted,  almost  before  any  other  documen 
tary.  The  generations  move  so  fast  and  change  so 


114  ESSAYS   IN   LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

much  that  Mrs.  Kemble  testified  even  more  than 
she  affected  to  do,  which  was  much,  to  antique  man 
ners  and  a  closed  chapter  of  history.  Her  conver 
sation  swarmed  with  people  and  with  criticism  of 
people,  with  the  ghosts  of  a  dead  society.  She 
had,  in  two  hemispheres,  seen  every  one  and  known 
every  one,  had  assisted  at  the  social  comedy  of  her 
age.  Her  own  habits  and  traditions  were  in  them 
selves  a  survival  of  an  era  less  democratic  and  more 
mannered.  I  have  no  room  for  enumerations,  which 
moreover  would  be  invidious  ;  but  the  old  London 
of  her  talk — the  direction  I  liked  it  best  to  take — 
was  in  particular  a  gallery  of  portraits.  She  made 
Count  d'Orsay  familiar,  she  made  Charles  Greville 
present ;  I  thought  it  wonderful  that  she  could  be 
anecdotic  about  Miss  Edgeworth.  She  reanimated 
the  old  drawing-rooms,  relighted  the  old  lamps,  re- 
tuned  the  old  pianos.  The  finest  comedy  of  all, 
perhaps,  was  that  of  her  own  generous  whimsicali 
ties.  She  was  superbly  willing  to  amuse,  and  on 
any  terms ,  and  her  temper  could  do  it  as  well  as  her 
wit.  If  either  of  these  had  failed,  her  eccentricities 
were  always  there.  She  had,  indeed,  so  much  finer 
a  sense  of  comedy  than  any  one  else  that  she  her 
self  knew  best,  as  well  as  recked  least,  how  she 
might  exhilarate.  I  remember  that  at  the  play  she 
often  said,  "Yes,  they're  funny;  but  they  don't  be 
gin  to  know  how  funny  they  might  be  !"  Mrs.  Kem 
ble  always  knew,  and  her  good-humor  effectually 
forearmed  her.  She  had  more  "habits"  than  most 
people  have  room  in  life  for,  and  a  theory  that  to  a 


FRANCES   ANNE    KEMBLE  115 

person  of  her  disposition  they  were  as  necessary  as 
the  close  meshes  of  a  strait-waistcoat.  If  she  had 
not  lived  by  rule  (on  her  showing),  she  would  have 
lived  infallibly  by  riot.  Her  rules  and  her  riots,  her 
reservations  and  her  concessions,  all  her  luxuriant 
theory  and  all  her  extravagant  practice,  her  drol 
lery  that  mocked  at  her  melancholy,  her  imagina 
tion  that  mocked  at  her  drollery,  and  her  rare  forms 
and  personal  traditions  that  mocked  a  little  at  every 
thing — these  were  part  of  the  constant  freshness 
which  made  those  who  loved  her  love  her  so  much. 
"  If  my  servants  can  live  with  me  a  week  they  can 
live  with  me  forever,"  she  often  said;  "but  the  first 
week  sometimes  kills  them."  I  know  not  what 
friends  it  may  also  have  killed,  but  very  fully  how 
many  it  spared  ;  and  what  dependants,  what  devo 
tees,  what  faithful  and  humble  affections  clung  to 
her  to  the  end  and  after.  A  domestic  who  had 
been  long  in  her  service  quitted  his  foreign  home 
the  instant  he  heard  of  her  death,  and,  travelling 
for  thirty  hours,  arrived  travel-stained  and  breathless, 
like  a  messenger  in  a  romantic  tale,  just  in  time  to 
drop  a  handful  of  flowers  into  her  grave. 

The  Alpine  guides  loved  her — she  knew  them  all, 
and  those  for  whom  her  name  offered  difficulties 
identified  her  charmingly  as  "  la  dame  qui  va  chantant 
par  les  montagnes."  She  had  sung,  over  hill  and 
dale,  all  her  days  (music  was  in  her  blood) ;  but 
those  who  had  not  been  with  her  in  Switzerland 
while  she  was  still  alert  never  knew  what  admira 
ble  nonsense  she  could  talk,  nor  with  what  original- 


Il6  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON  AND   ELSEWHERE 

ity  and  gayety  she  could  invite  the  spirit  of  mirth, 
flinging  herself,  in  the  joy  of  high  places,  on  the 
pianos  of  mountain  inns,  joking,  punning,  botaniz 
ing,  encouraging  the  lowly  and  abasing  the  proud, 
making  stupidity  everywhere  gape  (that  was  almost 
her  mission  in  life),  and  startling  infallibly  all  prim 
ness  of  propriety.  Punctually  on  the  first  of  June, 
every  year,  she  went  to  Switzerland  ;  punctually  on 
the  first  of  September  she  came  back.  During  the 
interval  she  roamed  as  far  and  as  high  as  she  could ; 
for  years  she  walked  and  climbed,  and  when  she 
could  no  longer  climb  she  rode.  When  she  could 
no  longer  ride  she  was  carried,  and  when  her  health 
ceased  to  permit  the  chaise-a-porteurs  it  was  as  if  the 
great  warning  had  come.  Then  she  moved  and 
mounted  only  with  wistful,  with  absolutely  tearful 
eyes,  sitting  for  hours  on  the  balconies  of  high- 
perched  hotels,  and  gazing  away  at  her  paradise 
lost.  She  yielded  the  ground  only  inch  by  inch, 
but  towards  the  end  she  had  to  accept  the  valleys 
almost  altogether  and  to  decline  upon  paltry  com 
promises  and  Italian  lakes.  Nothing  was  more  touch 
ing  at  the  last  than  to  see  her  caged  at  Stresa  or  at 
Orta,  still  slowly  circling  round  her  mountains,  but 
not  trusting  herself  to  speak  of  them.  I  remember 
well  the  melancholy  of  her  silence  during  a  long 
and  lovely  summer  drive,  after  the  turn  of  the  tide, 
from  one  of  the  places  just  mentioned  to  the  other; 
it  was  so  little  what  she  wanted  to  be  doing.  When, 
three  years  before  her  death,  she  had  to  recognize 
that  her  last  pilgrimage  had  been  performed,  this 


FRANCES   ANNE    KEMBLE  117 

was  the  knell  indeed;  not  the  warning  of  the  end, 
but  the  welcome  and  inexorable  term.  Those,  how 
ever,  with  whom  her  name  abides  will  see  her  as 
she  was  during  the  previous  years — a  personal  force 
so  large  and  sound  that  it  was,  in  fact,  no  merely 
simple  satisfaction  to  be  aware  of  such  an  abun 
dance  of  being  on  the  part  of  one  whose  innermost 
feeling  was  not  the  love  of  life.  To  such  uneasy 
observers,  seeking  for  the  truth  of  personal  histories 
and  groping  for  definitions,  it  revealed  itself  as  im 
pressive  that  she  had  never,  at  any  moment  from 
the  first,  been  in  spirit  reconciled  to  existence.  She 
had  done  what  her  conditions  permitted  to  become 
so,  but  the  want  of  adjustment,  cover  it  up  as  she 
might  with  will  or  wit,  with  passions  or  talents,  with 
laughter  or  tears,  was  a  quarrel  too  deep  for  any 
particular  conditions  to  have  made  right.  To  know 
her  well  was  to  ask  one's  self  what  conditions  could 
have  fallen  in  with  such  an  unappeasable  sense — I 
know  not  what  to  call  it,  such  arrogance  of  imagi 
nation.  She  was  more  conscious  of  this  infirmity 
than  those  who  might  most  have  suffered  from  it 
could  ever  be,  and  all  her  generosities  and  sociabili 
ties,  all  her  mingled  insistence  and  indifference  were, 
as  regards  others,  a  magnificently  liberal  penance 
for  it.  Nothing  indeed  could  exceed  the  tenderness 
of  her  conscience  and  the  humility  of  her  pride. 
But  the  contempt  for  conditions  and  circumstances, 
the  grandeur  preconceived,  were  essentially  there ; 
she  was,  in  the  ancient  sense  of  the  word,  indom 
itably,  incorruptibly  superb.  The  greatest  pride  of 


Il8  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND   ELSEWHERE 

all  is  to  be  proud  of  nothing,  the  pride  not  of  pre 
tension  but  of  renunciation  ;  and  this  was  of  course 
her  particular  kind.  I  remember  her  saying  once, 
in  relation  to  the  difficulty  of  being  pleased,  that 
nature  had  so  formed  her  that  she  was  ever  more 
aware  of  the  one  fault  something  beautiful  might 
have  than  of  all  the  beauties  that  made  it  what  it 
was.  The  beauty  of  life  at  best  has  a  thousand 
faults  ;  this  was  therefore  still  more  the  case  with 
that  of  a  career  in  the  course  of  which  two  resound 
ing  false  notes  had  ministered  to  her  characteristic 
irony.  She  detested  the  stage,  to  which  she  had 
been  dedicated  while  she  was  too  young  to  judge, 
and  she  had  failed  conspicuously  to  achieve  happi 
ness  or  tranquillity  in  marriage.  These  were  the 
principal  among  many  influences  that  made  that 
irony  defensive.  It  was  exclusively  defensive,  but 
it  was  the  first  thing  that  her  interlocutors  had  to 
meet.  To  a  lady  who  had  been  brought,  wonder- 
ingly,  to  call  upon  her,  and  who  the  next  day  caused 
inquiry  to  be  made  whether  she  had  not  during  the 
visit  dropped  a  purse  in  the  house,  she  requested 
answer  to  be  returned  that  she  was  sorry  her  lady 
ship  had  had  to  pay  so  much  more  to  see  her  than 
had  formerly  been  the  case.  To  a  very  loquacious 
actress  who,  coming  to  "consult"  her,  expatiated 
on  all  the  parts  she  desired  to  play,  beginning  with 
Juliet,  the  formidable  authority,  after  much  patience, 
replied,  "  Surely  the  part  most  marked  out  for  you 
is  that  of  Juliet's  nurse !" 

But  it  was  not  these  frank  humors  that  most  dis- 


FRANCES   ANNE   KEMBLE  119 

tinguished  her,  nor  those  legendary  brusquerics  into 
which  her  flashing  quickness  caused  her  to  explode 
under  visitations  of  dulness  and  density,  which,  to 
save  the  situation,  so  often  made  her  invent,  for 
arrested  interlocutors,  retorts  at  her  own  expense 
to  her  own  sallies,  and  which,  in  her  stall  at  the  thea 
tre,  when  comedy  was  helpless  and  heavy,  scarcely 
permitted  her  (while  she  instinctively  and  urgingly 
clapped  her  hands  to  a  faster  time)  to  sit  still  for 
the  pity  of  it ;  it  was  her  fine,  anxious  humanity,  the 
generosity  of  her  sympathies,  and  the  grand  line  and 
mass  of  her  personality.  This  elevation  no  small- 
ness,  no  vanity,  no  tortuosity  nor  selfish  precaution 
defaced,  and  with  such  and  other  vulgarities  it  had 
neither  common  idiom  nor  possible  intercourse.  Her 
faults  themselves  were  only  noble,  and  if  I  have  vent 
ured  to  allude  to  one  of  the  greatest  of  them,  this 
is  merely  because  it  was,  in  its  conscious  survival, 
the  quality  in  her  nature  which  arouses  most  tender 
ness  of  remembrance.  After  an  occasion,  in  1885, 
when  such  an  allusion  had  been  made  in  her  own 
presence,  she  sent  the  speaker  a  touching,  a  reveal 
ing  sonnet,  which,  as  it  has  not  been  published,  I 
take  the  liberty  of  transcribing  : 

"  Love,  joy  and  hope,  honor  and  happiness, 
And  all  that  life  could  precious  count  beside, 
Together  sank  into  one  dire  abyss. 
Think  you  there  was  too  much  of  any  pride 
To  fill  so  deep  a  pit,  a  gap  so  wide, 
Sorrow  of  such  a  dismal  wreck  to  hide, 
And  shame  of  such  a  bankruptcy's  excess  ? 


120  ESSAYS    IN   LONDON   AND   ELSEWHERE 

Oh,  friend  of  many  lonely  hours,  forbear 
The  sole  support  of  such  a  weight  to  chide  ! 
It  helps  me  all  men's  pity  to  abide, 
Less  beggar'd  than  I  am  still  to  appear, 
An  aspect  of  some  steadfastness  to  wear, 
Nor  yet  how  often  it  has  bent  confess 
Beneath  the  burden  of  my  wretchedness  !" 

It  is  not  this  last  note,  however,  that  any  last 
word  about  her  must  sound.  Her  image  is  com 
posed  also  of  too  many  fairer  and  happier  things, 
and  in  particular  of  two  groups  of  endowment, 
rarely  found  together,  either  of  which  would  have 
made  her  interesting  and  remarkable.  The  beauty 
of  her  deep  and  serious  character  was  extraordi 
narily  brightened  and  colored  by  that  of  her  numer 
ous  gifts,  and  remains  splendidly  lighted  by  the 
memory  of  the  most  resonant  and  most  personal 
of  them  all. 


GUSTAVE   FLAUBERT 

IN  the  year  1877  Gustave  Flaubert  wrote  to  a 
friend:  "You  speak  of  Balzac's  letters.  I  read 
them  when  they  appeared,  but  with  very  little  en 
thusiasm.  The  man  gains  from  them,  but  not  the 
artist.  He  was  too  much  taken  up  with  business. 
You  never  meet  a  general  idea,  a  sign  of  his  car 
ing  for  anything  beyond  his  material  interests.  .  .  . 
What  a  lamentable  life  !"  At  the  time  the  volumes 
appeared  (the  year  before)  he  had  written  to  Ed- 
mond  de  Goncourt :  "  What  a  preoccupation  with 
money  and  how  little  love  of  art !  Have  you  noticed 
that  he  never  once  speaks  of  it  ?  He  strove  for  glo 
ry,  but  not  for  beauty." 

The  reader  of  Flaubert's  own  correspondence,* 
lately  given  to  the  world  by  his  niece,  Madame  Com- 
manville,  and  which,  in  the  fourth  volume,  is  brought 
to  the  eve  of  his  death  —  the  student  of  so  much 
vivid  and  violent  testimony  to  an  intensely  exclusive 
passion  is  moved  to  quote  these  words  for  the  sake 
of  contrast.  It  will  not  be  said  of  the  writer  that  he 
himself  never  once  speaks  of  art ;  it  will  be  said  of 

*  "  Correspondance  de  Gustave  Flaubert."  Quatrieme  Se'rie. 
Paris,  1893 


122  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND   ELSEWHERE 

him  with  a  near  approach  to  truth  that  he  almost 
never  once  speaks  of  anything  else.  The  effect  of 
contrast  is  indeed  strong  everywhere  in  this  singular 
publication,  from  which  Flaubert's  memory  receives 
an  assault  likely  to  deepen  the  air  of  felicity  missed 
that  would  seem  destined  henceforth  to  hang  over  his 
personal  life.  "  May  I  be  skinned  alive,"  he  writes 
in  1854,  "before  I  ever  turn  my  private  feelings  to 
literary  account."  His  constant  refrain  in  his  letters 
is  the  impersonality,  as  he  calls  it,  of  the  artist,  whose 
work  should  consist  exclusively  of  his  subject  and  his 
style,  without  an  emotion,  an  idiosyncrasy  that  is  not 
utterly  transmuted.  Quotation  does  but  scanty  jus 
tice  to  his  rage  for  this  idea ;  almost  all  his  feelings 
were  such  a  rage  that  we  wonder  what  form  they 
would  have  borrowed  from  a  prevision  of  such  post 
humous  betrayal.  "  It's  one  of  my  principles  that 
one  must  never  write  down  one's  self.  The  artist 
must  be  present  in  his  work  like  God  in  creation, 
invisible  and  almighty,  everywhere  felt,  but  nowhere 
seen."  Such  was  the  part  he  allotted  to  form,  to 
that  rounded  detachment  which  enables  the  perfect 
work  to  live  by  its  own  life,  that  he  regarded  as 
indecent  and  dishonorable  the  production  of  any  im 
pression  that  was  not  intensely  calculated.  "  Feel 
ings  "  were  necessarily  crude,  because  they  were  in 
evitably  unselected,  and  selection  (for  the  picture's 
sake)  was  Flaubert's  highest  morality. 

This  principle  has  been  absent  from  the  counsels 
of  the  editor  of  his  letters,  which  have  been  given 
to  the  world,  so  far  as  they  were  procurable,  without 


GUSTAVE    FLAUBERT  123 

attenuation  and  without  scruple.  There  are  many,  of 
course,  that  circumstances  have  rendered  inaccessi 
ble,  but  in  spite  of  visible  gaps  the  revelation  is  full 
enough  and  remarkable  enough.  These  communica 
tions  would,  of  course,  not  have  been  matter  for  Flau 
bert's  highest  literary  conscience ;  but  the  fact  re 
mains  that  in  our  merciless  age  ineluctable  fate  has 
overtaken  the  man  in  the  world  whom  we  most  imagine 
gnashing  his  teeth  under  it.  His  ideal  of  dignity,  of 
honor  and  renown,  was  that  nothing  should  be  known 
of  him  but  that  he  had  been  an  impeccable  writer. 
"  I  feel  all  the  same,"  he  wrote  in  1852,  "that  I  shall 
not  die  before  I've  set  a-roaring  somewhere  (sans 
avoir  fait  rugir  quelque  parf)  such  a  style  as  hums 
in  my  head,  and  which  may  very  well  overpower  the 
sound  of  the  parrots  and  grasshoppers."  This  is  a 
grievous  accident  for  one  who  could  write  that  "the 
worship  of  art  contributes  to  pride,  and  of  pride  one 
has  never  too  much."  Sedentary,  cloistered,  passion 
ate,  cynical,  tormented  in  his  love  of  magnificent  ex 
pression,  of  subjects  remote  and  arduous,  with  an 
unattainable  ideal,  he  kept  clear  all  his  life  of  vul 
garity  and  publicity  and  newspaperism  only  to  be 
dragged  after  death  into  the  middle  of  the  market 
place,  where  the  electric  light  beats  fiercest.  Ma 
dame  Commanville's  publication  hands  him  over  to 
the  Philistines  with  every  weakness  exposed,  every 
mystery  dispelled,  every  secret  betrayed.  Almost 
the  whole  of  her  second  volume,  to  say  nothing  of 
a  large  part  of  her  first,  consists  of  his  love-letters 
to  the  only  woman  he  appears  to  have  addressed  in 


124  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

the  accents  of  passion.  His  private  style,  moreover, 
was  as  unchastened  as  his  final  form  was  faultless. 
The  result  happens  to  be  deeply  interesting  to  the 
student  of  the  famous  "  artistic  temperament " ;  it 
can  scarcely  be  so  for  a  reader  less  predisposed,  I 
think,  for  Flaubert  was  a  writers'  writer  as  much  as 
Shelley  was  a  "  poets'  poet "  ;  but  we  may  ask  our 
selves  if  the  time  has  not  come  when  it  may  well 
cease  to  be  a  leading  feature  of  our  homage  to  a  dis 
tinguished  man  that  we  shall  sacrifice  him  with  san 
guinary  rites  on  the  altar  of  our  curiosity.  Flaubert's 
letters,  indeed,  bring  up  with  singular  intensity  the 
whole  question  of  the  rights  and  duties,  the  decen 
cies  and  discretions  of  the  insurmountable  desire  to 
know.  To  lay  down  a  general  code  is  perhaps  as  yet 
impossible,  for  there  is  no  doubt  that  to  know  is  good, 
or  to  want  to  know,  at  any  rate,  supremely  natural. 
Some  day  or  other  surely  we  shall  all  agree  that  ev 
erything  is  relative,  that  facts  themselves  are  often 
falsifying,  and  that  we  pay  more  for  some  kinds  of 
knowledge  than  those  particular  kinds  are  worth. 
Then  we  shall  perhaps  be  sorry  to  have  had  it 
drummed  into  us  that  the  author  of  calm,  firm  mas 
terpieces,  of  "Madame  Bovary,"  of  "  Salammbo,"  of 
"  Saint- Julien  1'Hospitalier,"  was  narrow  and  noisy, 
and  had  not  personally  and  morally,  as  it  were,  the 
great  dignity  of  his  literary  ideal. 

When  such  revelations  are  made,  however,  they 
are  made,  and  the  generous  attitude  is  doubtless  at 
that  stage  to  catch  them  in  sensitive  hands.  Poor 
Flaubert  has  been  turned  inside  out  for  the  lesson, 


GUSTAVE    FLAUBERT  125 

but  it  has  been  given  to  him  to  constitute  practically 
— on  the  demonstrator's  table  with  an  attentive  cir 
cle  round — an  extraordinary,  a  magnificent  "  case." 
Never  certainly  in  literature  was  the  distinctively  lit 
erary  idea,  the  fury  of  execution,  more  passionately 
and  visibly  manifested.  This  rare  visibility  is  prob 
ably  the  excuse  that  the  responsible  hand  will  point 
to.  The  letters  enable  us  to  note  it,  to  follow  it  from 
phase  to  phase,  from  one  wild  attitude  to  another, 
through  all  the  contortions  and  objurgations,  all  the 
exaltations  and  despairs,  tensions  and  collapses,  the 
mingled  pieties  and  profanities  of  Flaubert's  simpli 
fied  yet  intemperate  life.  Their  great  interest  is  that 
they  exhibit  an  extraordinary  singleness  of  aim,  show 
us  the  artist  not  only  disinterested,  but  absolutely 
dishumanizecl.  They  help  us  to  perceive  what  Flau 
bert  missed  almost  more  than  what  he  gained,  and  if 
there  are  many  questions  in  regard  to  such  a  point  of 
view  that  they  certainly  fail  to  settle,  they  at  least 
cause  us  to  turn  them  over  as  we  have  seldom  turned 
them  before.  It  was  the  lifelong  discomfort  of  this 
particular  fanatic,  but  it  is  our  own  extreme  advan 
tage,  that  he  was  almost  insanely  excessive.  "  In 
literature,"  he  wrote  in  1861,  "the  best  chance  one 
has  is  by  following  out  one's  temperament  and  exag 
gerating  it."  His  own  he  could  scarcely  exaggerate ; 
but  it  carried  him  so  far  that  we  seem  to  see  on  dis 
tant  heights  his  agitations  outlined  against  the  sky. 
"  Impersonal "  as  he  wished  his  work  to  be,  it  was 
his  strange  fortune  to  be  the  most  expressive,  the 
most  vociferous,  the  most  spontaneous  of  men.  The 


126  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

record  of  his  temperament  is  therefore  complete,  and 
if  his  ambiguities  make  the  illuminating  word  diffi 
cult  to  utter,  it  is  not  because  the  picture  is  colorless. 
Why  was  such  a  passion,  in  proportion  to  its 
strength,  after  all  so  sterile  ?  There  is  life,  there  is 
blood  in  a  considerable  measure  in  "  Madame  Bova- 
ry,"  but  the  last  word  about  its  successors  can  only 
be,  it  seems  to  me,  that  they  are  splendidly  and  infi 
nitely  curious.  Why  may,  why  must,  indeed,  in  cer 
tain  cases,  the  effort  of  expression  spend  itself,  and 
spend  itself  in  success,  without  completing  the  circle, 
without  coming  round  again  to  the  joy  of  evocation  ? 
How  can  art  be  so  genuine  and  yet  so  unconsoled, 
so  unhumorous,  so  unsociable  ?  When  it  is  a  relig 
ion,  and  therefore  an  authority,  why  should  it  not  be, 
like  other  authorities,  a  guarantee  ?  How  can  it  be 
such  a  curse  without  being  also  a  blessing?  What 
germ  of  treachery  lurks  in  it  to  make  it,  not  necessar 
ily,  but  so  easily  that  there  is  but  a  hair-line  to  cross, 
delusive  for  personal  happiness  ?  Why,  in  short, 
when  the  struggle  is  success,  should  the  success  not 
be  at  last  serenity?  These  mysteries  and  many 
others  pass  before  us  as  we  listen  to  Flaubert's  loud 
plaint,  which  is  precisely  the  profit  we  derive  from 
his  not  having,  with  his  correspondents,  struck,  like 
Balzac,  only  the  commercial  note.  Nothing  in  his 
agitated  and  limited  life,  which  began  at  Rouen  in 
1821,  is  more  striking  than  the  prompt,  straightfor 
ward  way  his  destiny  picked  him  out  and  his  con 
science  handed  him  over.  As  most  young  men  have 
to  contend  with  some  domestic  disapproval  of  the 


GUSTAVE   FLAUBERT  127 

muse,  so  this  one  had  rather  to  hang  back  on  the 
easy  incline  and  to  turn  away  his  face  from  the  for 
midable  omens.  It  was  only  too  evident  that  he 
would  be  free  to  break  his  heart,  to  gueuler,  as  he 
fondly  calls  it,  to  spout,  to  mouth  and  thresh  about, 
to  that  heart's  content.  No  career  was  ever  more 
taken  for  granted  in  its  intensity,  nor  any  series  of 
tribulations  more  confidently  invited.  It  was  recog 
nized  from  the  first  that  the  tall  and  splendid  youth, 
green-eyed  and  sonorous  (his  stature  and  aspect  were 
distinguished),  was  born  to  gneukr,  and  especially  his 
own  large  cadences. 

His  father,  a  distinguished  surgeon,  who  died  early, 
had  purchased  near  Rouen,  on  the  Seine,  the  small 
but  picturesque  property  of  Croisset ;  and  it  was  in 
a  large  five-windowed  corner  room  of  this  quiet  old 
house,  his  study  for  forty  years,  that  his  life  was  virt 
ually  spent.  It  was  marked  by  two  great  events : 
his  journey  to  the  East  and  return  through  the  south 
of  Europe  with  Maxime  du  Camp  in  1849,  and  the 
publication  of  "  Madame  Bovary "  (followed  by  a 
train  of  consequences)  in  1857.  He  made  a  second 
long  journey  (to  Algeria,  Tunis,  and  the  site  of  Car 
thage)  while  engaged  in  writing  "  Salammbo  "  ;  he 
had  before  his  father's  death  taken  part  in  a  scant 
ed  family  pilgrimage  to  the  north  of  Italy,  and  he  ap 
pears  once  to  have  spent  a  few  weeks  on  the  Righi, 
and  at  another  time  a  few  days  in  London,  an  epi 
sode,  oddly  enough,  of  which  there  is  but  the  faintest, 
scarcely  a  recognizable  echo  in  his  correspondence. 
For  the  rest,  and  save  for  an  occasional  interlarding 


128  ESSAYS   IN   LONDON   AND   ELSEWHERE 

of  Paris,  his  years  were  spent  at  his  patient  table  in 
the  room  by  the  rural  Seine.  If  success  in  life  (and 
it  is  the  definition  open  perhaps  to  fewest  objections) 
consists  of  achieving  in  maturity  the  dreams  of  one's 
prime,  Flaubert's  measure  may  be  said  to  have  been 
full.  M.  Maxime  du  Camp,  in  those  two  curious 
volumes  of  "  Impressions  Litteraires,"  which  in  1882 
treated  a  surprised  world  and  a  scandalized  circle  to 
the  physiological  explanation  of  his  old  friend's  idio 
syncrasies,  declares  that  exactly  as  that  friend  was 
with  intensity  at  the  beginning,  so  was  he  with  inten 
sity  in  the  middle  and  at  the  end,  and  that  no  life 
was  ever  simpler  or  straighter  in  the  sense  of  being  a 
case  of  growth  without  change.  Doubtful,  indeed, 
were  the  urgency  of  M.  du  Camp's  revelation  and 
the  apparent  validity  of  his  evidence ;  but  whether 
or  no  Flaubert  was  an  epileptic  subject,  and  whether 
or  no  there  was  danger  in  our  unconsciousness  of 
the  question  (danger  to  any  one  but  M.  Maxime  du 
Camp),  the  impression  of  the  reader  of  the  letters  is 
in  complete  conformity  with  the  pronouncement  to 
which  I  allude.  The  Flaubert  of  fifty  differs  from 
the  Flaubert  of  twenty  only  in  size.  The  difference 
between  "  Bouvard  et  Pecuchet "  and  "  Madame  Bo- 
vary  "  is  not  a  difference  of  spirit ;  and  it  is  a  proof 
of  the  author's  essential  continuity  that  his  first  pub 
lished  work,  appearing  when  he  had  touched  middle 
life  and  on  which  his  reputation  mainly  rests,  had 
been  planned  as  long  in  advance  as  if  it  had  been  a 
new  religion. 

"  Madame  Bovary  "  was  five  years  in  the  writing, 


GUSTAVE    FLAUBERT  I 29 

and  the  "  Tentation  de  Saint-Antoine,"  which  saw  the 
light  in  1874,  but  the  consummation  of  an  idea  enter 
tained  in  his  boyhood.  "  Bouvard  et  Pecuchet,"  the 
intended  epos  of  the  blatancy,  the  comprehensive 
betise,  of  mankind,  was  in  like  manner  the  working- 
out  at  the  end  of  his  days  of  his  earliest  generaliza 
tion.  It  had  literally  been  his  life-long  dream  to 
crown  his  career  with  a  panorama  of  human  inep 
titude.  Everything  in  his  literary  life  had  been 
planned  and  plotted  and  prepared.  One.  moves  in 
it  through  an  atmosphere  of  the  darkest,  though  the 
most  innocent,  conspiracy.  He  was  perpetually  lay 
ing  a  train,  a  train  of  which  the  inflammable  sub 
stance  was  "style."  His  great  originality  was  that 
the  long  siege  of  his  youth  was  successful,  J  can 
recall  no  second  case  in  which  poetic  justice  has  in 
terfered  so  gracefully.  He  began  "  Madame  Bovary:' 
from  afar  off,  not  as  an  amusement  or  a  profit  or  a 
clever  novel  or  even  a  work  of  art  or  a  morceau  de  vie, 
as  his  successors  say  to-day,  not  even,  either,  as  the 
best  thing  he  could  make  it ;  but  as  a  premeditated 
classic,  a  masterpiece  pure  and  simple,  a  thing  of  con 
scious  perfection  and  a  contribution  of  the  first  mag 
nitude  to  the  literature  of  his  country.  There  would 
have  been  every  congruity  in  his  encountering  pro 
portionate  failure  and  the  full  face  of  that  irony  in 
things  of  which  he  was  so  inveterate  a  student.  A 
writer  of  tales  who  should  have  taken  the  extrava 
gance  of  his  design  for  the  subject  of  a  sad  "  novel 
ette  "  could  never  have  permitted  himself  any  termi 
nation  of  such  a  story  but  an  effective  anticlimax. 

9 


130  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON    AND    ELSEWHERE 

The  masterpiece  at  the  end  of  years  would  inevitably 
fall  very  flat  and  the  overweening  spirit  be  left  some 
how  to  its  illusions.  The  solution,  in  fact,  was  very 
different,  and  as  Flaubert  had  deliberately  sown,  so 
exactly  and  magnificently  did  he  reap.  The  perfec 
tion  of  "  Madame  Bovary "  is  one  of  the  common 
places  of  criticism,  the  position  of  it  one  of  the  high 
est  a  man  of  letters  dare  dream  of,  the  possession  of 
it  one  of  the  glories  of  France.  No  calculation  was 
ever  better  fulfilled,  nor  any  train  more  successfully 
laid.  It  is  a  sign  of  the  indefeasible  bitterness  to 
which  Flaubert's  temperament  condemned  him  and 
the  expression  of  which,  so  oddly,  is  yet  as  obstrep 
erous  and  boyish  as  that  of  the  happiness  arising  from 
animal  spirits — it  is  a  mark  of  his  amusing  pessimism 
that  so  honorable  a  first  step  should  not  have  done 
more  to  reconcile  him  to  life.  But  he  was  a  creature 
of  transcendent  dreams  and  unfathomable  perversi 
ties  of  taste,  and  it  was  in  his  nature  to  be  more  con 
scious  of  one  broken  spring  in  the  couch  of  fame, 
more  wounded  by  a  pin-prick,  more  worried  by  an 
assonance,  than  he  could  ever  be  warmed  or  pacified 
from  within.  Literature  and  life  were  a  single  busi 
ness  to  him,  and  the  "torment  of  style,"  that  might 
occasionally  intermit  in  one  place,  was  sufficiently  sure 
to  break  out  in  another.  We  may  polish  our  periods 
till  they  shine  again,  but  over  the  style  of  life  our  con 
trol  is  necessarily  more  limited. 

To  such  limitations  Flaubert  resigned  himself  with 
the  worst  possible  grace.  He  polished  ferociously, 
but  there  was  a  side  of  the  matter  that  his  process 


GUSTAVE    FLAUBERT  131 

could  never  touch.  Some  other  process  might  have 
been  of  use  ;  some  patience  more  organized,  some 
formula  more  elastic,  or  simply  perhaps  some  hap 
pier  trick  of  good-humor ;  at  the  same  time  it  must 
be  admitted  that  in  his  deepening  vision  of  the  imbe 
cility  of  the  world  any  remedy  would  have  deprived 
him  of  his  prime,  or  rather  of  his  sole,  amusement. 
The  befisc  of  mankind  was  a  colossal  comedy,  calling 
aloud  to  heaven  for  an  Aristophanes  to  match,  and 
Flaubert's  nearest  approach  to  joy  was  in  noting  the 
opportunities  of  such  an  observer  and  feeling  within 
himself  the  stirrings  of  such  a  genius  Towards  the 
end  he  found  himself  vibrating  at  every  turn  to  this 
ideal,  and  if  he  knew  to  the  full  the  tribulation  of 
proper  speech  no  one  ever  suffered  less  from  that  of 
proper  silence.  He  broke  it  in  his  letters,  on  a  thou 
sand  queer  occasions,  with  all  the  luxury  of  relief. 
He  was  blessed  with  a  series  of  correspondents  with 
whom  he  was  free  to  leave  nothing  unsaid ;  many  of 
them  ladies,  too,  so  that  he  had  in  their  company  all 
the  inspiration  of  gallantry  without  its  incidental  sac 
rifices.  The  most  interesting  of  his  letters  are  those 
addressed  between  1866  and  1876  to  Madame  George 
Sand,  which,  originally  collected  in  1884,  have  been 
re-embodied  in  Madame  Commanville's  publication. 
They  are  more  interesting  than  ever  when  read,  as  we 
are  now  able  to  read  them,  in  connection  with  Ma 
dame  Sand's  equally  personal  and  much  more  lumi 
nous  answers,  accessible  in  the  fifth  and  sixth  volumes 
of  her  own  copious  and  strikingly  honorable  "  Corre- 
spondance."  No  opposition  could  have  been  more  of 


132  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

a  nature  to  keep  the  ball  rolling  than  that  of  the  par 
ties  to  this  candid  commerce,  who  were  as  united  by 
affection  and  by  common  interests. as  they  were  di 
vided  by  temper  and  their  way  of  feeling  about  those 
interests.  Living,  each  of  them,  for  literature  (though 
Madame  Sand,  in  spite  of  her  immense  production, 
very  much  less  exclusively  for  it  than  her  indepen 
dent  and  fastidious  friend),  their  comparison  of  most 
of  the  impressions  connected  with  it  could  yet  only 
be  a  lively  contrast  of  temperaments.  Flaubert,  whose 
bark  indeed  (it  is  the  rule)  was  much  worse  than  his 
bite,  spent  his  life,  especially  the  later  part  of  it,  in  a 
state  of  acute  exasperation  ;  but  her  unalterable  se 
renity  was  one  of  the  few  irritants  that  were  tolerable 
to  him. 

Their  letters  are  a  striking  lesson  in  the  difference 
between  good  humor  and  bad,  and  seem  to  point  the 
moral  that  either  form  has  only  to  be  cultivated  to 
become  our  particular  kind  of  intelligence.  They 
compared  conditions,  at  any  rate,  her  expansion  with 
his  hard  contraction,  and  he  had  the  advantage  of 
rinding  in  a  person  who  had  sought  wisdom  in  ways 
so  many  and  so  devious  one  of  the  few  objects  with 
in  his  ken  that  really  represented  virtue  and  that  he 
could  respect  It  gives  us  the  pattern  of  his  experi 
ence  that  Madame  Sand  should  have  stood  to  him  for 
so  much  of  the  ideal,  and  we  may  say  this  even  under 
the  impression  produced  by  a  reperusal  of  her  total 
correspondence,  a  monument  to  her  generosity  and 
variety.  Poor  Flaubert  appears  to  us  to-day  almost 
exactly  by  so  much  less  frustrated  as  he  was  beguiled 


GUSTAVE    FLAUBERT  133 

by  this  happy  relation,  the  largest  he  ever  knew.  His 
interlocutress,  who  in  the  evening  of  an  arduous  life 
accepted  refreshment  wherever  she  found  it  and  who 
could  still  give  as  freely  as  she  took,  for  immemorial 
habit  had  only  added  to  each  faculty,  his  correspond 
ent,  for  all  her  love  of  well-earned  peace,  offered 
her  breast  to  his  aggressive  pessimism  ;  had  motherly, 
reasoning,  coaxing  hands  for  it;  made,  in  short,  such 
sacrifices  that  she  often  came  to  Paris  to  go  to  brawl 
ing  Magny  dinners  to  meet  him  and  wear,  to  please 
him,  as  I  have  heard  one  of  the  diners  say,  unaccus 
tomed  peach-blossom  dresses.  It  contributes  to  our 
sense  of  what  there  was  lovable  at  the  core  of  his  ef 
fort  to  select  and  his  need  to  execrate  that  he  should 
have  been  able  to  read  and  enjoy  so  freely  a  writer  so 
fluid ;  and  it  also  reminds  us  that  imagination  is,  after 
all,  for  the  heart,  the  safest  quality.  Flaubert  had  excel 
lent  honest  inconsistencies,  crude  lapses  from  purity  in 
which  he  could  like  the  books  of  his  friends.  He  was 
susceptible  of  painless  amusement  (a  rare  emotion  with 
him)  when  his  imagination  was  touched,  as  it  was  in 
fallibly  and  powerfully,  by  affection.  To  make  a  hard 
rule  never  to  be  corrupted,  and  then  to  make  a  special 
exception  for  fondness,  is  of  course  the  right  attitude. 
He  had  several  admirations,  and  it  might  always 
be  said  of  him  that  he  would  have  admired  if  he 
could,  for  he  could  like  a  thing  if  he  could  be  proud 
of  it,  and  the  act  adapted  itself  to  his  love  of  magnifi 
cence.  He  could  like,  indeed,  almost  any  one  he  could 
say  great  colored  things  about :  the  ancients,  almost 
promiscuously,  for  they  never  wrote  in  newspapers,  and 


134  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON    AND    ELSEWHERE 

Shakespeare  (of  whom  he  could  not  say  fine  things 
enough)  and  Rabelais  and  Montaigne  and  Goethe  and 
Victor  Hugo  {his  biggest  modern  enthusiasm)  and  Le- 
conte  de  Lisle  and  Renan  and  Theophile  Gautier.  He 
did  scant  justice  to  Balzac  and  even  less  to  Alfred  de 
Musset.  On  the  other  hand,  he  had  an  odd  and  inter 
esting  indulgence  for  Boileau.  Balzac  and  Musset 
were  not,  by  his  measure,  "  writers,"  and  he  maintains 
that,  be  it  in  verse,  be  it  in  prose,  it  is  only  so  far  as 
they  "write  "  that  authors  live  ;  between  the  two  cate 
gories  he  makes  a  fundamental  distinction.  The  lat 
ter,  indeed,  the  mere  authors,  simply  did  not  exist  for 
him,  and  with  Mr.  Besant's  Incorporated  Society  he 
would  have  had  nothing  whatever  to  do.  He  declares 
somewhere  that  it  is  only  the  writer  who  survives  in  the 
poet.  In  spite  of  his  patience  with  the  "  muse  "  to  whom 
the  majority  of  the  letters  in  the  earlier  of  the  volumes 
before  us  were  addressed,  and  of  the  great  invidious 
coup  de  chapeau  with  which  he  could  here  and  there 
render  homage  to  versification,  his  relish  for  poetry  as 
poetry  was  moderate.  Far  higher  was  his  estimate  of 
prose  as  prose,  which  he  held  to  be  much  the  more  dif 
ficult  art  of  the  two,  with  more  maddening  problems 
and  subtler  rhythms,  and  on  whose  behalf  he  found 
it  difficult  to  forgive  the  "  proud-sister "  attitude  of 
verse.  No  man  at  any  rate,  to  make  up  for  scanty  pref 
erences,  can  have  had  a  larger  list  of  literary  aversions. 
His  eye  swept  the  field  in  vain  for  specimens  untaint 
ed  with  the  "  modern  infection,"  the  plague  which  had 
killed  Theophile  Gautier  and  to  which  he  considered 
that  he  himself  had  already  succumbed.  If  he  glanced 


GUSTAVE    FLAUBERT  135 

at  &feuilleton  he  saw  that  Madame  Sarah  Bernhardt 
was  "  a  social  expression,"  and  his  resentment  of  this 
easy  wisdom  resounded  disproportionately  through  all 
the  air  he  lived  in.  One  has  always  a  kindness  for 
people  who  detest  the  contemporary  tone  if  they  have 
done  something  fine ;  but  the  baffling  thing  in  Flau 
bert  was  the  extent  of  his  suffering  and  the  inelas 
ticity  of  his  humor.  The  jargon  of  the  newspapers, 
the  slovenliness  of  the  novelists,  the  fatuity  of  Octave 
Feuillet,  to  whom  he  was  exceedingly  unjust,  for  that 
writer's  love  of  magnificence  was  not  inferior  to  his 
critic's,  all  work  upon  him  with  an  intensity  only  to 
be  explained  by  the  primary  defect  of  his  mind,  his 
want  of  a  general  sense  of  proportion.  That  sense 
stopped  apparently  when  he  had  settled  the  relation 
of  the  parts  of  a  phrase,  as  to  which  it  was  exquisite. 

Fortunately  he  had  confidants  to  whom  he  could 
cry  out  when  he  was  hurt,  and  whose  position,  as  he 
took  life  for  the  most  part  as  men  take  a  violent 
toothache,  was  assuredly  no  sinecure.  To  more  than 
one  intense  friendship  were  his  younger  and  middle 
years  devoted ;  so  close  was  his  union  with  Louis 
Bouilhet,  the  poet  and  dramatist,  that  he  could  say  in 
1870:  "I  feel  no  longer  the  need  to  write,  because  I 
wrote  especially  for  a  being  who  is  no  more.  There's 
no  taste  in  it  now — the  impulse  has  gone."  As  he 
wrote  for  Bouilhet,  so  Bouilhet  wrote  for  him.  "  There 
are  so  few  people  who  like  what  I  like  or  have  an 
idea  of  what  I  care  for."  That  was  the  indispensable 
thing  for  him  in  a  social,  a  personal  relation,  the  ex 
istence  in  another  mind  of  a  love  of  literature  suffi- 


136  ESSAYS   IN   LONDON   AND   ELSEWHERE 

ciently  demonstrated  to  relieve  the  individual  from 
the  great  and  damning  charge,  the  charge  perpetually 
on  Flaubert's  lips  in  regard  to  his  contemporaries, 
the  accusation  of  malignantly  hating  it.  This  univer 
sal  conspiracy  he  perceived,  in  his  own  country,  in 
every  feature  of  manners,  and  to  a  degree  which  may 
well  make  us  wonder  how  high  he  would  have  piled 
the  indictment  if  he  had  extended  the  inquiry  to  the 
manners  of  ours.  We  draw  a  breath  of  relief  when 
we  think  to  what  speedier  suffocation  he  would  have 
yielded  had  he  been  materially  acquainted  with  the 
great  English-speaking  peoples.  When  he  declared, 
naturally  enough,  that  liking  what  he  liked  was  a  con 
dition  of  intercourse,  his  vision  of  this  community 
was  almost  destined,  in  the  nature  of  things,  to  re 
main  unachievable ;  for  it  may  really  be  said  that  no 
one  in  the  world  ever  liked  anything  so  much  as  Flau 
bert  liked  beauty  of  style.  The  mortal  indifference 
to  it  of  empires  and  republics  was  the  essence  of 
that  "  modern  infection  "  from  which  the  only  escape 
would  have  been  to  ne  faire  que  de  Vart.  Mankind, 
for  him,  was  made  up  of  the  three  or  four  persons, 
Ivan  Turgenieff  in  the  number,  who  perceived  what 
he  was  trying  for,  and  of  the  innumerable  millions 
who  didn't.  Poor  M.  Maxime  du  Camp,  in  spite  of 
many  of  the  leading  characteristics  of  a  friend,  was 
one  of  this  multitude,  and  he  pays  terribly  in  the 
pages  before  us  for  his  position.  He  pays,  to  my 
sense,  excessively,  for  surely  he  had  paid  enough 
and  exactly  in  the  just  and  appropriate  measure, 
when,  in  the  introduction  contributed  to  the  "  defini- 


GUSTAVE    FLAUBERT  137 

tive  "  edition  of  "  Madame  Bovary,"  M.  Guy  de  Mau 
passant,  avenging  his  master  by  an  exquisite  stroke, 
made  public  the  letter  of  advice  and  remonstrance 
addressed  to  Flaubert  by  M.  du  Camp,  then  editor 
of  the  Revue  de  Paris,  on  the  eve  of  the  serial  ap 
pearance  of  the  former's  first  novel  in  that  period 
ical.  This  incomparable  effusion,  with  its  amazing 
reference  to  excisions,  and  its  suggestion  that  the 
work  be  placed  in  the  hands  of  an  expert  and  inex 
pensive  corrector  who  will  prepare  it  for  publication, 
this  priceless  gem  will  twinkle  forever  in  the  setting 
M.  de  Maupassant  has  given  it,  or  we  may,  perhaps, 
still  more  figuratively  say  in  the  forehead  of  the  mas 
terpiece  it  discusses.  But  there  was  surely  a  need 
less,  there  was  surely  a  nervous  and  individual  feroc 
ity  in  such  a  vindictive  giving  to  the  world  of  every 
passage  of  every  letter  in  which  the  author  of  that 
masterpiece  has  occasion  to  allude  to  his  friend's 
want  of  tact.  It  naturally  made  their  friendship 
unsuccessful  that  Flaubert  disliked  M.  du  Camp, 
but  it  is  a  monstrous  imputation  on  his  character 
to  assume  that  he  was  small  enough  never  to  have 
forgiven  and  forgotten  the  other's  mistake.  Great 
people  never  should  be  avenged ;  it  diminishes  their 
privilege.  What  M.  du  Camp,  so  far  as  an  outsider 
may  judge,  had  to  be  punished  for  was  the  tone  of 
his  reminiscences.  But  the  tone  is  unmistakably  the 
tone  of  affection.  He  may  have  felt  but  dimly  what 
his  old  comrade  was  trying  for,  and  even  the  latent 
richness  of  "  L '.Education  Sentimentale,"  but  he  ren 
ders  full  justice  to  Flaubert's  noble  independence. 


138  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

The  tone  of  Flaubert's  own  allusions  is  a  different 
thing  altogether.  It  is  not  unfair  to  say  that  all  this 
disproportionate  tit-for-tat  renders  the  episode  one  of 
the  ugliest  little  dramas  of  recent  literary  history. 
The  irony  of  a  friend's  learning  after  long  years  and 
through  the  agency  of  the  press  how  unsuspectedly 
another  friend  was  in  the  habit  of  talking  of  him,  is 
an  irony  too  cruel  for  impartial  minds.  The  disaster 
is  absolute,  and  our  compassion  goes  straight  to  the 
survivor.  There  are  other  survivors  who  will  have" 
but  little  more  reason  to  think  that  the  decencies 
have  presided  over  such  a  publication. 

It  is  only  a  reader  here  and  there  in  all  the  wide 
world  who  understands  to-day,  or  who  ever  under 
stood,  what  Gustave  Flaubert  tried  for ;  and  it  is  only 
when  such  a  reader  is  also  a  writer,  and  a  tolera 
bly  tormented  one,  that  he  particularly  cares.  Poor 
Flaubert's  great  revenge,  however,  far  beyond  that  of 
any  editorial  treachery,  is  that  when  this  occasional 
witness  does  care  he  cares  very  peculiarly  and  very 
tenderly,  and  much  more  than  he  may  be  able  suc 
cessfully  to  say.  Then  the  great  irritated  style-seeker 
becomes,  in  the  embracing  mind,  an  object  of  inter 
est  and  honor ;  not  so  much  for  what  he  altogether 
achieved,  as  for  the  way  he  strove  and  for  the  inspir 
ing  image  that  he  presents.  There  is  no  reasoning 
about  him ;  the  more  we  take  him  as  he  is  the  more 
he  has  a  special  authority.  "  Salammbo,"  in  which 
we  breathe  the  air  of  pure  aesthetics,  is  as  hard  as 
stone  ;  "  L'Education,"  for  the  same  reason,  is  as  cold 
as  death  ;  "  Saint- Antoine  "  is  a  medley  of  wonderful 


GUSTAVE    FLAUBERT  139 

bristling  metals  and  polished  agates,  and  the  droll 
ery  of  "  Bouvard  et  Pecuchet "  (a  work  as  sad  as 
something  perverse  and  puerile  done  for  a  wager) 
about  as  contagious  as  the  smile  of  a  keeper  showing 
you  through  the  wards  of  a  madhouse.  In  "  Madame 
Bovary  "  alone  emotion  is  just  sufficiently  present  to 
take  off  the  chill.  This  truly  is  a  qualified  report, 
yet  it  leaves  Flaubert  untouched  at  the  points  where 
he  is  most  himself,  leaves  him  master  of  a  province 
in  which,  for  many  of  us,  it  will  never  be  an  idle 
errand  to  visit  him.  The  way  to  care  for  him  is  to 
test  the  virtue  of  his  particular  exaggeration,  to  ac 
cept  for  the  sake  of  his  aesthetic  influence  the  idiosyn 
crasies  now  revealed  to  us,  his  wild  gesticulation,  his 
plaintive,  childish  side,  the  side  as  to  which  one  asks 
one's  self  what  has  become  of  ultimate  good-humor,  of 
human  patience,  of  the  enduring  man.  He  pays  and 
pays  heavily  for  his  development  in  a  single  direc 
tion,  for  it  is  probable  that  no  literary  effort  so  great, 
accompanied  with  an  equal  literary  talent,  ever  failed 
on  so  large  a  scale  to  be  convincing.  It  convinces 
only  those  who  are  converted,  and  the  number  of 
such  is  very  small.  It  is  an  appeal  so  technical  that 
we  may  say  of  him  still,  but  with  more  resignation, 
what  he  personally  wailed  over,  that  nobody  takes 
his  great  question  seriously.  This  is  indeed  why 
there  may  be  for  each  of  the  loyal  minority  a  certain 
fine  scruple  against  insistence.  If  he  had  had  in  his 
nature  a  contradiction  the  less,  if  his  indifference 
had  been  more  forgiving,  this  is  surely  the  way  in 
which  he  would  have  desired  most  to  be  preserved. 


140  ESSAYS   IN   LONDON  AND    ELSEWHERE 

To  no  one  at  any  rate  need  it  be  denied  to  say 
that  the  best  way  to  appreciate  him  is,  abstaining 
from  the  clumsy  process  of  an  appeal  and  the  vulgar 
process  of  an  advertisement,  exclusively  to  use  him, 
to  feel  him,  to  be  privately  glad  of  his  message.  In 
proportion  as  we  swallow  him  whole  and  cherish  him 
as  a  perfect  example,  his  weaknesses  fall  into  their 
place  as  the  conditions  about  which,  in  estimating  a 
man  who  has  been  original,  there  is  a  want  of  tact  in 
crying  out.  There  is,  of  course,  always  the  answer 
that  the  critic  is  to  be  suborned  only  by  originalities 
that  fertilize ;  the  rejoinder  to  which,  of  equal  neces 
sity,  must  ever  be  that  even  to  the  critics  of  unborn 
generations  poor  Flaubert  will  doubtless  yield  a  fund 
of  amusement.  To  the  end  of  time  there  will  be 
something  flippant,  something  perhaps  even  "  clever  " 
to  be  said  of  his  immense  ado  about  nothing.  Those 
for  some  of  whose  moments,  on  the  contrary,  this  ado 
will  be  as  stirring  as  music,  will  belong  to  the  group 
that  has  dabbled  in  the  same  material  and  striven 
with  the  same  striving.  The  interest  he  presents,  in 
truth,  can  only  be  a  real  interest  for  fellowship,  for 
initiation  of  the  practical  kind;  and  in  that  case  it 
becomes  a  sentiment,  a  sort  of  mystical  absorption 
or  fruitful  secret.  The  sweetest  things  in  the  world 
of  art  or  the  life  of  letters  are  the  irresponsible  sym 
pathies  that  seem  to  rest  on  divination.  Flaubert's 
hardness  was  only  the  act  of  holding  his  breath  in 
the  reverence  of  his  search  for  beauty ;  his  universal 
renunciation,  the  long  spasm  of  his  too-fixed  atten 
tion,  was  only  one  of  the  absurdest  sincerities  of  art. 


GUSTAVE    FLAUBERT  141 

To  the  participating  eye  these  things  are  but  details 
in  the  little  square  picture  made  at  this  distance  of 
time  by  his  forty  years  at  the  battered  table  at  Crois- 
set.  Everything  lives  in  this  inward  vision  of  the 
wide  room  on  the  river,  almost  the  cell  of  a  mono 
maniac,  but  consecrated  ground  to  the  faithful,  which, 
as  he  tried  and  tried  again,  must  so  often  have  re 
sounded  with  the  pomp  of  a  syntax  addressed,  in  his 
code,  peremptorily  to  the  ear.  If  there  is  something 
tragi-comic  in  the  scene,  as  of  a  tenacity  in  the  void 
or  a  life  laid  down  for  grammar,  the  impression  passes 
when  we  turn  from  the  painful  process  to  the  sharp 
and  splendid  result.  Then,  since  if  we  like  people 
very  much  we  end  by  liking  their  circumstances,  the 
eternal  chamber  and  the  dry  Benedictine  years  have 
a  sufficiently  palpable  offset  in  the  repousse  bronze  of 
the  books. 

An  incorruptible  celibate  and  dedaigneux  des  femmes 
(as,  in  spite  of  the  hundred  and  forty  letters  addressed 
to  Madame  Louise  Colet,  M.  de  Maupassant  styles 
him  and,  in  writing  to  Madame  Sand,  he  confesses 
himself),  it  was  his  own  view  of  his  career  that,  as  art 
was  the  only  thing  worth  living  for,  he  had  made  im 
mense  sacrifices  to  application — sacrificed  passions, 
joys,  affections,  curiosities,  and  opportunities.  He 
says  that  he  shut  his  passions  up  in  cages,  and  only 
at  long  intervals,  for  amusement,  had  a  look  at  them. 
The  orgie  de  litterature,  in  short,  had  been  his  sole 
form  of  excess.  He  knew  best,  of  course,  but  his 
imaginations  about  himself  (as  about  other  matters) 
were,  however  justly,  rich,  and  to  the  observer  at  this 


142  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON    AND    ELSEWHERE 

distance  he  appears  truly  to  have  been  made  of  the 
very  stuff  of  a  Benedictine.  He  compared  himself  to 
the  camel,  which  can  neither  be  stopped  when  he  is  go 
ing  nor  moved  when  he  is  resting.  He  was  so  seden 
tary,  so  averse  to  physical  exercise,  which  he  speaks 
of  somewhere  as  an  occupation  funeste,  that  his  main 
alternative  to  the  chair  was,  even  by  day,  the  bed, 
and  so  omnivorous  in  research  that  the  act  of  com 
position,  with  him,  was  still  more  impeded  by  knowl 
edge  than  by  taste.  "  I  have  in  me,"  he  writes  to 
the  imperturbable  Madame  Sand,  "  a  fond  d' ecclesias- 
tique  that  people  don't  know  " — the  clerical  basis  of 
the  Catholic  clergy.  "  We  shall  talk  of  it,"  he  adds, 
"much  better  viv&  voce  than  by  letter";  and  we  can 
easily  imagine  the  thoroughness  with  which  between 
the  unfettered  pair,  when  opportunity  favored,  the 
interesting  subject  was  treated.  At  another  time, 
indeed,  to  the  same  correspondent,  who  had  given 
him  a  glimpse  of  the  happiness  of  being  a  grand 
mother,  he  refers  with  touching  sincerity  to  the  poig 
nancy  of  solitude  to  which  the  "  radical  absence  of  the 
feminine  element "  in  his  life  had  condemned  him. 
"  Yet  I  was  born  with  every  capacity  for  tenderness. 
One  doesn't  shape  one's  destiny,  one  undergoes  it. 
I  was  pusillanimous  in  my  youth — I  was  afraid  of 
life.  We  pay  for  everything."  Besides,  it  was  his 
theory  that  a  "man  of  style"  should  never  stoop  to 
action.  If  he  had  been  afraid  of  life  in  fact,  I  must 
add,  he  was  preserved  from  the  fear  of  it  in  imagina 
tion  by  that  great  "historic  start,"  the  sensibility  to 
the  frisson  historique,  which  dictates  the  curious  and 


GUSTAVE    FLAUBERT  143 

beautiful  outburst,  addressed  to  Madame  Colet,  when 
he  asks  why  it  had  not  been  his  lot  to  live  in  the 
age  of  Nero.  "  How  I  would  have  talked  with  the 
Greek  rhetors,  travelled  in  the  great  chariots  on  the 
Roman  roads,  and  in  the  evening,  in  the  hostelries, 
turned  in  with  the  vagabond  priests  of  Cybele  !  .  -.  . 
I  hare  lived,  all  over,  in  those  directions ;  doubtless 
in  some  prior  state  of  being.  I'm  sure  I've  been, 
under  the  Roman  empire,  manager  of  some  troop  of 
strolling  players,  one  of  the  rascals  who  used  to  go 
to  Sicily  to  buy  women  to  make  actresses,  and  who 
were  at  once  professors,  panders,  and  artists.  These 
scoundrels  have  wonderful  'mugs'  in  the  comedies 
of  Plautus,  in  reading  which  I  seem  to  myself  to  re 
member  things." 

He  was  an  extreme  admirer  of  Apuleius,  and  his 
florid  inexperience  helps  doubtless  somewhat  to  ex 
plain  those  extreme  sophistications  of  taste  of  which 
"La  Tentation  de  Saint- Antoine"  is  so  elaborate  an 
example.  Far  and  strange  are  the  refuges  in  which 
such  an  imagination  seeks  oblivion  of  the  immedi 
ate  and  the  ugly.  His  life  was  that  of  a  pearl-diver, 
breathless  in  the  thick  element  while  he  groped  for 
the  priceless  word,  and  condemned  to  plunge  again 
and  again.  He  passed  it  in  reconstructing  sentences, 
exterminating  repetitions,  calculating  and  comparing 
cadences,  harmonious  chutes  de  phrase,  and  beating 
about  the  bush  to  deal  death  to  the  abominable 
assonance.  Putting  aside  the  particular  ideal  of 
style  which  made  a  pitfall  of  the  familiar,  few  men 
surely  have  ever  found  it  so  difficult  to  deal  with 


144  ESSAYS   IN   LONDON   AND   ELSEWHERE 

the  members  of  a  phrase.  He  loathed  the  smug 
face  of  facility  as  much  as  he  suffered  from  the 
nightmare  of  toil ;  but  if  he  had  been  marked  in 
the  cradle  for  literature  it  may  be  said  without  para 
dox  that  this  was  not  on  account  of  any  native  dis 
position  to  write,  to  write  at  least  as  he  aspired 
and  as  he  understood  the  term.  He  took  long  years 
to  finish  his  books,  and  terrible  months  and  weeks 
to  deliver  himself  of  his  chapters  and  his  pages. 
Nothing  could  exceed  his  endeavor  to  make  them 
all  rich  and  round,  just  as  nothing  could  exceed  the 
unetherized  anguish  in  which  his  successive  chil 
dren  were  born.  His  letters,  in  which,  inconse- 
quently  for  one  who  had  so  little  faith  in  any  rigor 
of  taste  or  purity  of  perception  save  his  own,  he 
takes  everybody  into  his  most  intimate  literary  con 
fidence,  the  pages  of  the  publication  before  us  are 
the  record  of  everything  that  retarded  him.  The 
abyss  of  reading  answered  to  the  abyss  of  writing ; 
with  the  partial  exception  of  "Madame  Bovary" 
every  subject  that  he  treated  required  a  rising  flood 
of  information.  There  are  libraries  of  books  behind 
his  most  innocent  sentences.  The  question  of  "art" 
for  him  was  so  furiously  the  question  of  form,  and 
the  question  of  form  was  so  intensely  the  question 
of  rhythm,  that  from  the  beginning  to  the  end  of  his 
correspondence  we  scarcely  ever  encounter  a  men 
tion  of  any  beauty  but  verbal  beauty.  He  quotes 
Goethe  fondly  as  to  the  supreme  importance  of  the 
"  conception,"  but  the  conception  remains  for  him 
essentially  the  plastic  one. 


GUSTAVE    FLAUBERT  145 

There  are  moments  when  his  restless  passion  for 
form  strikes  us  as  leaving  the  subject  out  of  account 
altogether,  as  if  he  had  taken  it  up  arbitrarily,  blindly, 
preparing  himself  the  years  of  misery  in  which  he 
is  to  denounce  the  grotesqueness,  the  insanity  of  his 
choice.  Four  times,  with  his  orgueil,  his  love  of 
magnificence,  he  condemned  himself  incongruously 
to  the  modern  and  familiar,  groaning  at  every  step 
over  the  horrible  difficulty  of  reconciling  "  style  "  in 
such  cases  with  truth  and  dialogue  with  surface. 
He  wanted  to  do  the  battle  of  Thermopylae,  and  he 
found  himself  doing  "Bouvard  et  Pecuchet."  One  of 
the  sides  by  which  he  interests  us,  one  of  the  sides 
that  will  always  endear  him  to  the  student,  is  his 
extraordinary  ingenuity  in  lifting  without  falsifying, 
finding  a  middle  way  into  grandeur  and  edging  off 
from  the  literal  without  forsaking  truth.  This  way 
was  open  to  him  from  the  moment  he  could  look 
down  upon  his  theme  from  the  position  of  line  blague 
superieiire,  as  he  calls  it,  the  amused  freedom  of  an 
observer  as  irreverent  as  a  creator.  But  if  subjects 
were  made  for  style  (as  to  which  Flaubert  had  a 
rigid  theory :  the  idea  was  good  enough  if  the  ex 
pression  was),  so  style  was  made  for  the  ear,  the  last 
court  of  appeal,  the  supreme  touchstone  of  perfec 
tion.  He  was  perpetually  demolishing  his  periods 
in  the  light  of  his  merciless  gueulades.  He  tried 
them  on  every  one  ;  his  gueulades  could  make  him 
sociable.  The  horror,  in  particular,  that  haunted  all 
his  years  was  the  horror  of  the  cliche,  the  stereotyped, 
the  thing  usually  said  and  the  way  it  was  usually 
10 


146  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON  AND    ELSEWHERE 

said,  the  current  phrase  that  passed  muster.  Noth 
ing,  in  his  view,  passed  muster  but  freshness,  that 
which  came  into  the  world,  with  all  the  honors,  for 
the  occasion.  To  use  the  ready-made  was  as  dis 
graceful  as  for  a  self-respecting  cook  to  buy  a  tinned 
soup  or  a  sauce  in  a  bottle.  Flaubert  considered 
that  the  dispenser  of  such  wares  was  indeed  the 
grocer,  and,  producing  his  ingredients  exclusively  at 
home,  he  would  have  stabbed  himself  for  shame  like 
Vatel.  This  touches  on  the  strange  weakness  of  his 
mind,  his  puerile  dread  of  the  grocer,  the  bourgeois, 
the  sentiment  that  in  his  generation  and  the  pre 
ceding  misplaced,  as  it  were,  the  spirit  of  advent 
ure  and  the  sense  of  honor,  and  sterilized  a  whole 
province  of  French  literature.  That  worthy  citizen 
ought  never  to  have  kept  a  poet  from  dreaming. 

He  had  for  his  delectation  and  for  satiric  purposes 
a  large  collection  of  those  second-hand  and  approxi 
mate  expressions  which  begged  the  whole  literary 
question.  To  light  upon  a  perfect  example  was  his 
nearest  approach  to  natural  bliss.  "  Bouvard  et  Pe- 
cuchet"  is  a  museum  of  such  examples,  the  cream 
of  that  "  Dictionnaire  des  Idees  Regues "  for  which 
all  his  life  he  had  taken  notes  and  which  eventually 
resolved  itself  into  the  encyclopaedic  exactitude  and 
the  lugubrious  humor  of  the  novel.  Just  as  subjects 
were  meant  for  style,  so  style  was  meant  for  images ; 
therefore  as  his  own  were  numerous  and  admirable 
he  would  have  contended,  coming  back  to  the  source, 
that  he  was  one  of  the  writers  to  whom  the  signifi 
cance  of  a  work  had  ever  been  most  present.  This 


GUSTAVE    FLAUBERT  147 

significance  was  measured  by  the  amount  of  style 
and  the  quantity  of  metaphor  thrown  up.  Poor  sub 
jects  threw  up  a  little,  fine  subjects  threw  up  much, 
and  the  finish  of  his  prose  was  the  proof  of  his  pro 
fundity.  If  you  pushed  far  enough  into  language 
you  found  yourself  in  the  embrace  of  thought. 
There  are,  doubtless,  many  persons  whom  this  ac 
count  of  the  matter  will  fail  to  satisfy,  and  there  will 
indeed  be  no  particular  zeal  to  put  it  forward  even 
on  the  part  of  those  for  whom,  as  a  writer,  Flaubert 
most  vividly  exists.  He  is  a  strong  taste,  like  any 
other  that  is  strong,  and  he  exists  only  for  those 
who  have  a  constitutional  need  to  feel  in  some  di 
rection  the  particular  aesthetic  confidence  that  he  in 
spires.  That  confidence  rests  on  the  simple  fact 
that  he  carried  execution  so  far  and  nailed  it  so 
fast.  No  one  will  care  for  him  at  all  who  does  not 
care  for  his  metaphors,  and  those  moreover  who 
care  most  for  these  will  be  discreet  enough  to  ad 
mit  that  even  a  style  rich  in  similes  is  limited  when 
it  renders  only  the  visible.  The  invisible  Flaubert 
scarcely  touches ;  his  vocabulary  and  all  his  meth 
ods  were  unadjusted  and  alien  to  it.  He  could  not 
read  his  French  Wordsworth,  M.  Sully-Prudhomme ; 
he  had  no  faith  in  the  power  of  the  moral  to  offer 
a  surface.  He  himself  offers  such  a  flawless  one 
that  this  hard  concretion  is  success.  If  he  is  im 
possible  as  a  companion  he  is  deeply  refreshing  as 
a  reference  ;  and  all  that  his  reputation  asks  of  you 
is  an  occasional  tap  of  the  knuckle  at  those  firm 
thin  plates  of  gold  which  constitute  the  leaves  of 


148  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

his  books.  This  passing  tribute  will  yield  the  best 
results  when  you  have  been  prompted  to  it  by  some 
other  prose. 

In  other  words,  with  all  his  want  of  portee,  as  the 
psychological  critics  of  his  own  country  would  say 
of  him,  poor  Flaubert  is  one  of  the  artists  to  whom 
an  artist  will  always  go  back.  And  if  such  a  pil 
grim,  in  the  very  act  of  acknowledgment,  drops  for 
an  instant  into  the  tenderness  of  compassion,  it  is 
a  compassion  singularly  untainted  with  patronage  or 
with  contempt ;  full,  moreover,  of  mystifications  and 
wonderments,  questions  unanswered  and  speculations 
vain.  Why  was  he  so  unhappy  if  he  was  so  active ; 
why  was  he  so  intolerant  if  he  was  so  strong  ?  Why 
should  he  not  have  accepted  the  circumstance  that 
M.  de  Lamartine  also  wrote  as  his  nature  impelled, 
and  that  M.  Louis  Enault  embraced  a  convenient 
opportunity  to  go  to  the  East  ?  The  East,  if  we  listen 
to  him,  should  have  been  closed  to  one  of  these  gen 
tlemen  and  literature  forbidden  to  the  other.  Why 
does  the  inevitable  perpetually  infuriate  him,  and 
why  does  he  inveterately  resent  the  ephemeral  ?  Why 
does  he,  above  all,  in  his  private,  in  other  words  his 
continuous  epistolary,  despair,  assault  his  correspond 
ents  with  malodorous  comparisons  ?  The  bad  smell 
of  the  age  was  the  main  thing  he  knew  it  by.  Natu 
rally  therefore  he  found  life  a  chose  hideuse.  If  it  was 
his  great  merit  and  the  thing  we  hold  on  to  him  for 
that  the  artist  and  the  man  were  welded  together, 
what  becomes,  in  the  proof,  of  a  merit  that  is  so  little 
illuminating  for  life?  What  becomes  of  the  virtue 


GUSTAVE    FLAUBERT  149 

of  the  beauty  that  pretends  to  be  worth  living  for  ? 
Why  feel,  and  feel  genuinely,  so  much  about  "  art," 
in  order  to  feel  so  little  about  its  privilege  ?  Why 
proclaim  it  on  the  one  hand  the  holy  of  holies,  only 
to  let  your  behavior  confess  it  on  the  other  a  tem 
ple  open  to  the  winds  ?  Why  be  angry  that  so  few 
people  care  for  the  real  thing,  since  this  aversion  of 
the  many  leaves  a  luxury  of  space  ?  The  answer  to 
these  too  numerous  questions  is  the  final  perception 
that  the  subject  of  our  observations  failed  of  happi 
ness,  failed  of  temperance,  not  through  his  excesses, 
but  absolutely  through  his  barriers.  He  passed  his 
life  in  strange  oblivion  of  the  circumstance  that, 
however  incumbent  it  may  be  on  most  of  us  to  do 
our  duty,  there  is,  in  spite  of  a  thousand  narrow 
dogmatisms,  nothing  in  the  world  that  any  one  is 
under  the  least  obligation  to  like — not  even  (one 
braces  one's  self  to  risk  the  declaration)  a  particu 
lar  kind  of  writing.  Particular  kinds  of  writing  may 
sometimes,  for  their  producers,  have  the  good  -  fort 
une  to  please  -}  but  these  things  are  windfalls,  pure 
luxuries,  not  resident  even  in  the  cleverest  of  us  as 
natural  rights.  Let  Flaubert  always  be  cited  as  one 
of  the  devotees  and  even,  when  people  are  fond  of 
the  word,  as  one  of  the  martyrs  of  the  plastic  idea ; 
but  let  him  be  still  more  considerately  preserved 
and  more  fully  presented  as  one  of  the  most  con 
spicuous  of  the  faithless.  For  it  was  not  that  he 
went  too  far,  it  was  on  the  contrary  that  he  stopped 
too  short.  He  hovered  forever  at  the  public  door, 
in  the  outer  court,  the  splendor  of  which  very  prop- 


150  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON    AND    ELSEWHERE 

erly  beguiled  him,  and  in  which  he  seems  still  to 
stand  as  upright  as  a  sentinel  and  as  shapely  as  a 
statue.  But  that  immobility  and  even  that  erectness 
were  paid  too  dear.  The  shining  arms  were  meant 
to  carry  further,  the  other  doors  were  meant  to  open. 
He  should  at  least  have  listened  at  the  chamber  of 
the  soul.  This  would  have  floated  him  on  a  deeper 
tide ;  above  all  it  would  have  calmed  his  nerves. 

1893. 


PIERRE   LOTI 

A  FEW  years  ago  the  author  of  these  remarks  re 
ceived  from  an  observant  friend  then  in  Paris  (not  a 
Frenchman)  a  letter  containing  a  passage  which  he 
ventures  to  transcribe.  His  correspondent  had  been 
to  see  a  celebrated  actress — the  most  celebrated  ac 
tress  of  our  time — in  a  new  and  successful  play. 

' '  She  is  a  wonderful  creature,  but  how  a  being  so  intelligent 
as  she  can  so  elaborate  what  has  so  little  moral  stuff  in  it  to  work 
upon  I  don't  comprehend.  The  play  is  hard  and  sinister  and 
horrible  without  being  in  the  least  degree  tragic  or  pathetic  , 
one  felt  when  it  was  over  like  an  accomplice  in  some  cold-blood 
ed  piece  of  cruelty.  I  am  moved  to  give  up  the  French  and 
call  to  my  own  species  to  stand  from  under  and  let  their  fate 
overtake  them.  Such  a  disproportionate  development  of  the 
external  perceptions  and  such  a  perversion  of  the  natural  feel 
ings  must  work  its  Nemesis  in  some  way." 

These  simple  lines,  on  account  of  their  general, 
not  of  their  special  application,  have  come  back  to 
me  in  reading  over  the  several  volumes  of  the  re 
markable  genius  who  wears  in  literature  the  name  of 
Pierre  Loti,  as  well  as  in  refreshing  my  recollection 
of  some  of  the  pages  of  his  contemporaries.  -^An 
achievement  in  art  or  in  letters  grows  more  interest 
ing  when  we  begin  to  perceive  its  connections ;  and, 


152  ESSAYS    IN   LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

indeed,  it  may  be  said  that  the  study  of  connections 
is  the  recognized  function  of  intelligent  criticism.  It 
is  a  comparatively  poor  exercise  of  the  attention  (for 
the  critic  always,  I  mean)  to  judge  a  book  all  by  itself, 
even  if  it  happen  to  be  a  book  as  independent,  as  lit 
tle  the  product  of  a  school  and  a  fashion,  as  "  Le 
Mariage  de  Loti "  or  •"  Mon  Frere  Yves  "  or  "  P£- 
cheur  d'Islande."  Each  of  these  works  is  interest 
ing  as  illustrating  the  talent  and  character  of  the 
author,  but  they  become  still  more  interesting  as 
we  note  their  coincidences  and  relations  with  other 
works,  for  then  they  begin  to  illustrate  other  talents 
and  other  characters  as  well:  the  plot  thickens,  the 
whole  spectacle  expands.  We  seem  to  be  studying 
not  simply  the  genius  of  an  individual,  but,  in  a  liv 
ing  manifestation,  that  of  a  nation  or  of  a  conspicu 
ous  group ; Jthe  nation  or  the  group  becomes  a  great 
figure  operating  on  a  great  scale,  and  the  drama  of 
its  literary  production  (to  speak  only  of  that)  a  kind 
of  world-drama,  lighted  by  the  universal  sun,  with 
Europe  and  America  for  the  public,  and  the  arena 
of  races,  the  battle-field  of  their  inevitable  contrasts 
and  competitions,  for  the  stage.  Is  not  the  enter 
tainment,  moreover,  a  particularly  good  bill,  as  they 
say  at  the  theatre,  when  it  is  a  question  of  the  per 
formances  of  France  ?  Will  not  the  connoisseur  feel 
much  at  his  ease,  in  such  a  case,  about  the  high  ca 
pacity  of  the  actor,  settle  himself  in  his  stall  with 
the  comfortable  general  confidence  that  he  is  to  listen 
to  a  professional  and  not  to  an  amateur  ?  Whatever 
benefits  or  injuries  that  great  country  may  have  con- 


PIERRE    LOTI  153 

ferred  upon  mankind,  she  has  certainly  rendered 
them  the  service  of  being  always,  according  to  her 
own  expression,  Men  en  scene.  She  commits  herself 
completely  and  treats  us  to  extreme  cases ;  her  cases 
are  test-cases,  her  experiments  heroic  and  conclusive. 
She  has  educated  our  observation  by  the  finish  of 
her  manner,  and  whether  or  no  she  has  the  best  part 
in  the  play  we  feel  that  she  has  rehearsed  best. 

A  writer  of  the  ability  of  Alphonse  Daudet,  of  that 
of  Guy  de  Maupassant,  or  of  that  of  the  brothers  De 
Goncourt,  can  never  fail  to  be  interesting  by  virtue 
of  that  ability,  the  successive  manifestations  of  which 
keep  our  curiosity  alive ;  but  this  curiosity  is  never 
so  great  as  after  we  have  noted,  as  I  think  we  almost 
inveterately  do,  that  the  strongest  gift  of  each  of  them 
is  the  strongest  gift  of  all :  a  remarkable  art  of  ex 
pressing  the  life,  of  picturing  the  multitudinous,  ad 
venturous  experience,  of  the  senses.  We  recognize 
this  accomplishment  with  immense  pleasure  as  we 
read — a  pleasure  so  great  that  it  is  not  for  some  time 
that  we  make  the  other  observation  that  inevitably 
follows  on  its  heels.  That  observation  is  somewhat  to 
this  effect :  that  in  comparison  the  deeper,  stranger, 
subtler  inward  life,  the  wonderful  adventures  of  the 
soul,  are  so  little  pictured  that  they  may  almost  be 
said  not  to  be  pictured  at  all.  We  end  with  an  im 
pression  of  want  of  equilibrium  and  proportion,  and 
by  asking  ourselves  (so  coercive  are  the  results  of 
comparative  criticism)  whether  such  a  sacrifice  be 
quite  obligatory.  The  value  of  the  few  words  in  the 
letter  I  just  cited  is  simply  that  they  offer  a  fresh, 


154  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON    AND    ELSEWHERE 

direct,  almost  startled  measure  of  the  intensity  of 
the  sacrifice,  accompanied  with  the  conviction  that 
it  must  sooner  or  later  be  paid  for,  like  every  other 
extravagance,  and  that  if  the  payment  be  on  the  scale 
of  the  aberration  it  will  make  an  eddy  of  which  those 
who  are  wise  in  time  should  keep  clear.  This  pro 
fuse  development  of  the  external  perceptions — those 
of  the  appearance,  the  sound,  the  taste,  the  material 
presence  and  pressure  of  things,  will  at  any  rate,  I 
think,  not  be  denied  to  be  the  master-sign  of  the 
novel  in  France  as  the  first  among  the  younger  tal 
ents  show  it  to  us  to-day.  They  carry  into  the  whole 
business  of  looking,  seeing,  hearing,  smelling,  into  all 
kinds  of  tactile  sensibility  and  into  noting,  analyzing, 
and  expressing  the  results  of  these  acts,  a  serious 
ness  much  greater  than  that-  of  any  other  people. 
Their  tactile  sensibility  is  immense,  and  it  may  be 
said  in  truth  to  have  produced  a  literature.  They 
are  so  strong  on  this  side  that  they  seem  to  me  to  be 
easily  masters,  and  I  cannot  imagine  that  their  su 
premacy  should  candidly  be  contested. 

An  acute  sense  of  aspect  and  appearance  is  not 
common,  for  the  only  sense  that  most  people  have  is 
of  the  particular  matter  with  which,  on  any  occasion, 
their  business,  their  interest  or  subsistence  is  bound 
up;  but  it  is  less  uncommon  in  some  societies  than 
in  others,  and  it  flourishes  conspicuously  in  France. 
Such  is  the  witness  borne  by  the  very  vocabulary  of 
the  people,  which  abounds  in  words  and  idioms  ex 
pressing  shades  and  variations  of  the  visible.  I  once 
in  Paris,  at  a  cafe,  heard  a  gentleman  at  a  table  next 


PIERRE    LOTI  155 

to  my  own  say  to  a  companion,  speaking  of  a  lady 
who  had  just  entered  the  establishment,  "  A  quoi  res- 
semble-t-elle  done  ?"  "  Mon  Dieu,  a  une  poseuse  de 
sangsues."  The  reply  struck  me  as  a  good  example 
of  prompt  exactness  of  specification.  If  you  ask  a 
French  hatter  which  of  two  hats  is  the  more  com 
mendable,  he  will  tell  you  that  one  of  them  d'egage 
mieux  la  physionomie.  The  judgment  of  his  English 
congener  may  be  as  good  (we  ourselves  perhaps  are 
pledged  to  think  it  better),  but  it  will  be  more  dumb 
and  pointless— he  will  have  less  to  say  about  disen 
gaging  the  physiognomy.  Half  the  faculty  I  speak 
of  in  the  French  is  the  expressive  part  -of  it.  The 
perception  and  the  expression  together  have  been 
worked  to-day  (for  the  idiosyncrasy  is  noticeably  mod 
ern)  with  immense  vigor,  and  from  Balzac  to  Pierre 
Loti,  the  latest  recruit  to  the  band  of  painters,  the 
successful  workers  have  been  the  novelists.  There 
are  different  ways  of  working,  and  Flaubert,  Edmond 
and  Jules  de  Goncourt,  Zola,  Daudet,  Maupaussant, 
and  the  writer  to  whom  I  more  particularly  refer, 
have  each  had  a  way  of  his  own.  There  are  story 
tellers  to-day  in  France  who  are  not  students,  or  at 
any  rate  not  painters,  of  the  mere  palpable — but  then 
they  are  not  conspicuously  anything  else.  I  can  think 
of  but  one  writer  whose  foremost  sign,  though  his  lit 
erary  quality  is  of  the  highest,  does  not  happen  to  be 
visual  curiosity.  M.  Paul  Bourget  looks  much  more 
within  than  without,  and  notes  with  extraordinary 
closeness  the  action  of  life  on  the  soul,  especially 
the  corrosive  and  destructive  action.  Many  people 


156  ESSAYS   IN   LONDON   AND   ELSEWHERE 

in  England  hold  that  corrosion  and  destruction  are 
not  worth  noting;  but  it  should  be  added  that  they 
are  probably  not  as  a  general  thing  people  to  whom 
one  would  go  for  information  on  the  subject — I  mean 
on  the  subject  of  the  soul.  M.  Paul  Bourget,  how 
ever,  is  peculiar  in  this,  that  he  is  both  master  and 
pupil;  he  is  alone,  parmi  ks  jeunes ;  and,  moreover, 
there  are  other  directions  in  which  he  is  not  isolated 
at  all,  those  of  tactile  sensibility,  or  isolated  only  be 
cause  he  follows  them  so  far. 

The  case  was  not  always  as  I  have  here  attempted 
to  indicate  it,  for  Madame  George  Sand  had  an  ad 
mirable  faculty  of  looking  within  and  a  compara 
tively  small  one  of  looking  without.  Attempting, 
some  months  ago,  at  Venice,  to  read  over  "Consu- 
elo,"  I  was  struck  on  the  spot  with  the  very  small  de 
gree  to  which  the  author  troubled  herself  about  close 
representation,  the  absence  of  any  attempt  at  it  or 
pretension  to  it ;  and  I  could  easily  understand  the 
scorn  with  which  that  sort  of  irresponsibility  (reach 
ing  at  times  on  Madame  Sand's  part  a  truly  exas 
perating  artlessness)  has  always  filled  the  votaries  of 
the  reproductive  method.  M.  Octave  Feuillet  turns 
his  polished  glass  on  the  life  of  the  spirit,  but  what 
he  finds  in  the  spirit  is  little  more  (as  it  strikes  me) 
than  the  liveliest  phenomena  of  the  flesh.  His  he 
roes  and  heroines  are  lined  on  the  under  side  with 
the  same  stuff  as  on  the  upper  —  a  curious  social 
silken  material,  adapted  only,  as  we  are  constantly 
reminded,  to  the  contacts  of  patricians.  If  the  soul, 
for  the  moralizing  observer,  be  a  romantic,  moon- 


PIERRE    LOTI  157 

lighted  landscape,  with  woods  and  mountains  and 
dim  distances,  visited  by  strange  winds  and  mur 
murs,  for  M.  Octave  Feuillet  it  is  rather  a  square 
French  salon  in  white  and  gold,  with  portraits  of  the 
king  and  queen  and  the  pope,  a  luminary  in  old  Se 
vres  and  plenty  of  bibelots  and  sofas.  I  hasten  to 
add  that  it  is  an  apartment  in  which  one  may  spend 
an  hour  most  agreeably.  Even  at  present  there  are 
distinguished  variations,  if  we  look  outside  the  group 
of  novelists.  If  there  were  not  a  poet  like  Sully- 
Prudhomme  or  a  moralist  like  M.  Renan,  the  thesis 
that  the  French  imagination  has  none  but  a  sensual 
conscience  would  be  made  simpler  than  it  ever  is  to 
prove  anything. 

We  perceive,  on  the  other  hand,  that  the  air  of  in 
itiation  fails  as  soon  as  the  inward  barrier  is  crossed, 
and  the  diminution  of  credit  produced  by  this  failure 
is,  I  confess,  the  only  Nemesis  in  which  for  the  pres 
ent  I  have  confidence.  It  appears  to  me,  indeed,  all- 
sufficient — it  appears  ideal ;  and  if  the  writers  I  have 
named  deserve  chastisement  for  their  collective  sin 
against  proportion  (since  sin  it  shall  be  held),  I  know 
not  how  a  more  terrible  one  could  have  been  invent 
ed.  The  penalty  they  pay  is  the  heaviest  that  can 
be  levied,  the  most  summary  writ  that  can  be  served, 
upon  a  great  talent  —  great  talents  having,  as  a  gen 
eral  thing,  formidable  defences — and  consists  simply 
in  the  circumstance  that,  when  they  lay  their  hands 
upon  the  spirit  of  man,  they  cease  to  seem  expert. 
This  would  be  a  great  humiliation  if  they  recognized 
it.  They  rarely  do,  however,  so  far  as  may  be  ob- 


158  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON    AND   ELSEWHERE 

served ;  which  is  a  proof  that  their  defences  are  for 
midable.  There  is  a  distinct  transition,  at  any  rate, 
in  the  case  I  mention,  and  assuredly  a  distinct  de 
scent.  As  painters  they  go  straight  to  the  mark,  as 
analysts  they  only  scratch  the  surface.  We  leave 
authority  on  one  side  of  the  line,  and  encounter  on 
the  other  a  curiously  complacent  and  unconscious 
provincialism.  Such  is  the  impression  we  gather  in 
every  case,  though  there  are  some  cases  in  which  the 
incongruity  is  more  successfully  dissimulated  than  in 
others.  What  makes  it  grow,  when  once  we  perceive 
it,  is  the  large  and  comprehensive  pretensions  of  the 
writers — the  sense  they  give  us  of  camps  and  ban 
ners,  war-cries  and  watch-fires.  The  "Journal"  of 
the  brothers  De  Goncourt,  of  which  two  volumes  have 
lately  been  put  forth,  is  a  very  interesting  publica 
tion  and  suggests  many  thoughts ;  but  the  first  re 
mark  to  be  made  about  it  is  that  it  makes  a  hundred 
claims  to  penetration,  to  profundity.  At  the  same 
time  it  is  a  perfect  revelation  of  the  visual  passion 
and  of  the  way  it  may  flourish  (not  joyously  indeed 
in  this  case,  but  with  an  air  of  jealous,  nervous,  con 
scious  tension),  at  the  expense  of  other  passions  and 
even  other  faculties.  Perhaps  the  best  illustration  of 
all  would  be  the  difference  between  the  superiority  of 
Gustave  Flaubert  as  a  painter  of  aspects  and  sensa 
tions,  and  his  lapses  and'  limitations,  his  general  in 
significance,  as  a  painter  of  ideas  and  moral  states. 
If  you  feel  the  talent  that  abides  in  his  style  very 
much  (and  some  people  feel  it  immensely  and  as  a 
sort  of  blinding  glory),  you  are  bribed  in  a  measure 


PIERRE    LOTI  159 

to  overlook  the  inequality ;  but  there  comes  a  mo 
ment  when  the  bribe,  large  as  it  is,  is  ineffectual. 
His  imagination  is  so  fine  that  we  take  some  time  to 
become  conscious  that  almost  none  of  it  is  moral  or 
even  human.  "  Bouvard  et  Pecuchet,"  even  as  an 
unfinished  work,  has  merits  of  execution  that  could 
only  spring  from  a  great  literary  energy;  but  "Bou 
vard  et  Pecuchet "  is  surely,  in  the  extreme  juvenil 
ity  of  its  main  idea,  one  of  the  oddest  productions 
for  which  a  man  who  had  lived  long  in  the  world 
was  ever  responsible.  Flaubert,  indeed,  was  the  very 
apostle  of  surface,  and  an  extraordinary  example  of  a 
sort  of  transposition  of  the  conscience.  If  for  "  per 
version  of  the  natural  feelings "  (the  phrase  of  the 
letter  I  quoted)  we  read  inaction  rather,  and  inex 
perience  and  indifference  in  regard  to  the  phenome 
na  of  character  and  the  higher  kinds  of  sensibility, 
he  will  appear  to  represent  the  typical  disparity  at 
its  maximum.  The  brothers  De  Goncourt  strike  us 
as  knowing  as  little  about  these  matters  as  he,  but 
somehow  it  is  not  suggested  to  us  in  the  same  degree 
that  they  might  have  known  more.  His  gift  is  not 
their  gift,  and  it  is  his  gift  that  makes  us  measure 
him  by  a  high  standard.  "Germinie  Lacerteux," 
indeed,  without  being  so  fine  as  "Madame  Bovary," 
has  great  ability ;  but  nothing  else  they  have  writ 
ten  has  an  equal  ability  with  "  Germinie  Lacerteux." 
One  of  the  consequences  of  the  generalization  I 
have  ventured  to  make  is  that  when  a  new  French 
talent  mounts  above  the  horizon  we  watch  with  a 
kind  of  anxiety  to  see  whether  it  will  present  itself 


l6o  ESSAYS    IN.  LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

in  a  subversive  and  unaccommodating  manner.  M. 
Pierre  Loti  is  a  new  enough  talent  for  us  still  to  feel 
something  of  the  glow  of  exultation  at  his  having 
not  contradicted  us.  He  has  in  fact  done  exactly 
the  opposite.  He  has  added  more  than  we  had 
dared  to  hope  to  the  force  of  our  generalization  and 
removed  every  scruple  of  a  magnanimous  sort  that 
we  might  have  felt  in  making  it.  By  scruples  of  a 
magnanimous  sort  I  mean  those  that  might  have 
been  engendered  by  a  sense  of  favors  intensely 
enjoyed.  At  the  moment  we  are  under  the  spell  of 
such  a  talent  as  Alphonse  Daudet's  or  Emile  Zola's 
or  Guy  de  Maupassant's  or  (to  give  variety  to  the 
question)  that  of  so  rare  and  individual  a  genius  as 
this  exquisite  Loti,  it  takes  no  great  sophistry  to  con 
vince  us  of  the  indelicacy,  of  the  ingratitude  even, 
of  turning  an  invidious  eye  on  anything  so  irrele 
vant  as  deficiencies.  But  the  spell  is  foredoomed 
to  fluctuations,  to  lapses,  and  we  end  by  seeming 
to  perceive  with  perplexity  that  even  literary  figures 
so  brilliant  as  these  may  have  too  happy,  too  in 
solent  a  lot.  Are  they  after  all  to  enjoy  their 
honors  without  paying  for  them  ?  How  we  should 
have  to  pay  for  them  if  we  were  to  succeed  in 
plucking  them  and  wearing  them  !  The  fortunate 
Frenchmen  give  us  the  sense  of  a  kind  of  fatuity 
in  impunity,  a  kind  of  superficiality  in  distinction,  a 
kind  of  irritating  mastery  of  the  trick  of  eating  your 
cake  and  having  it.  Such  is  one  of  the  reflections 
to  which  Pierre  Loti  eventually  leads  us.  In  com 
mon  with  his  companions  he  performs  so  beautifully 


PIERRE   LOTI  l6l 

as  to  kick  up  a  fine  golden  dust  over  the  question 
of  what  he  contains — or  of  what  he  doesn't.  The 
agility  of  all  their  movements  makes  up  for  the 
thinness  of  so  much  of  their  inspiration.  To  be  so 
constituted  as  to  expose  one's  self  to  the  charge  of 
vulgarity  of  spirit  and  yet  to  have  a  charm  that  suc 
cessfully  snaps  its  fingers  at  all  "charges,"  is  to  be 
so  lucky  that  those  who  work  in  harder  conditions 
surely  may  allow  themselves  the  solace  of  small 
criticisms.  It  may  be  said  that  if  we  indulge  in 
small  criticisms  we  resist  our  author's  charm  after 
all  ;  but  the  answer  to  this  is  that  the  effort  to 
throw  off  our  enthralment  even  for  an  hour  is  an 
almost  heroic  struggle  with  a  sweet  superstition. 
The  whole  second-rate  element  in  Loti,  for  instance, 
becomes  an  absolute  stain  if  we  think  much  about 
it.  But  practically  (and  this  is  his  first-rate  triumph) 
we  don't  think  much  about  it,  so  unreserved  is  our 
surrender  to  irresistible  illusion  and  contagious  life. 
To  be  so  rare  that  you  can  be  common,  so  good 
that  you  can  be  bad  without  loss  of  caste,  be  a 
mere  sponge  for  sensations  and  yet  not  forfeit  your 
human  character— secure,  on  the  contrary,  sympathy 
and  interest  for  it  whenever  you  flash  that  facet  into 
the  sun — and  then  on  top  of  all  write,  as  Goldsmith 
wrote,  like  an  angel  —  that  surely  is  to  wear  the 
amulet  to  some  purpose,  the  literary  feather  with  a 
swagger  that  becomes  pardonable.  This  rarity  of 
the  mixture,  which  makes  such  a  literary  unity  of 
such  a  personal  duality,  is  altogether  in  Pierre  Loti 
a  source  of  fascination.  He  combines  aptitudes 


162  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND   ELSEWHERE 

which  seldom  sit  down  to  the  same  table,  and  com 
bines  them  with  singular  facility  and  naturalness,  an 
air  of  not  caring  whether  he  combines  them  or  not. 
He  may  not  be  as  ignorant  of  literature  as  he  pre 
tends  (he  protests  perhaps  a  little  too  much  that  he 
never  opens  a  book),  but  it  is  very  clear  that  what 
is  at  the  bottom  of  his  effect  is  not  (in  a  degree 
comparable  at  least  to  the  intensity  of  the  effect)  the 
study  of  how  to  produce  it.  What  he  studies  is  a 
very  different  matter,  and  I  know  no  case  in  which 
literature,  left  to  come  off  as  it  can,  comes  off  so 
beautifully.  To  be  such  a  rover  of  the  deep,  such 
a  dabbler  in  adventure  as  would  delight  the  soul  of 
Mr.  Robert  Louis  Stevenson,  and  yet  to  have  at 
one's  command  a  sensitive  and  expressive  appara 
tus  separated  by  the  whole  scale  from  that  of  Jim 
Hawkins  and  John  Silver,  is  to  have  little  need  of 
"cultivating"  originality,  as  M.  Guy  de  Maupassant 
the  other  day  recommended  us  to  do.  An  officer  in 
the  French  navy,  perpetually  circumnavigating  the 
globe,  M.  Lot!  has  spent  most  of  his  life  (though  its 
duration,  I  believe,  has  not  yet  been  considerable) 
in  strange  waters  and  far  lands,  and  his  taste  for 
foreign  contacts  and  free  manners,  for  the  natural, 
personal  life,  has  led  him  to  cultivate  most  of  his 
opportunities.  That  taste  and  those  opportunities 
are  among  soldiers  and  sailors  common  enough ;  but 
what  is  not  so  in  the  same  connection  is  the  spirit 
of  the  artist,  which  in  M.  Loti  is  as  natural  as  all  the 
rest.  There  is  a  reflection  in  regard  to  the  distribu 
tion  of  earthly  advantages  which  is  probably  familiar 


PIERRE   LOTI  163 

to  most  men  of  letters,  and  which  at  any  rate  often 
occurs  to  the  writer  of  these  lines.  The  persons  who 
see  the  great  things  are  terribly  apt  not  to  be  persons 
who  can  write  or  even  talk  about  them  ;  and  the  per 
sons  who  can  write  about  them,  reproduce  them  in 
some  way,  are  terribly  apt  not  to  be  persons  who 
see  them.  The  "  chance  "  is  with  the  blind  or  the 
dumb,  and  the  immortal  form,  waiting  for  a  revelation 
that  doesn't  come,  is  with  the  poor  sedentary  folk 
who  bewail  the  waste  of  chances.  Many-an  artist 
will  have  felt  his  heart  sink  on  questioning  some 
travelled  friend  in  vain.  The  travelled  friend  has 
not  noticed  or  has  nothing  to  say  about  things  which 
must  have  had  an  inestimable  suggestiveness.  So 
we  frame  a  sort  of  ideal  of  success,  in  which  the  man 
of  action  and  the  man  of  observation  melt  into  each 
other.  The  transcendent  result  is  a  precious  creat 
ure  who  knows  the  sea  as  well  as  Captain  Marryat, 
and  writes  about  it  as  well  —  I  can  only  say  as  well 
as  Pierre  Loti. 

"  She  flew  before  the  weather,  the  Marie  [a  fishing-boat  in 
the  Icelandic  waters],  flew  faster  and  faster,  and  the  weather 
flew  as  well,  as  before  something  mysterious  and  terrible.  The 
gale,  the  sea,  the  Marie  herself,  were  all  taken  with  the  same 
madness  of  flight  and  speed  in  the  same  direction.  What  scur 
ried  the  fastest  was  the  wind  ;  then  the  great  surges  of  the 
swell,  slower  and  heavier,  rushing  after  it  ;  then  the  Marie, 
borne  along  in  the  universal  motion.  The  waves  pursued  her 
with  their  blanched  crests,  rolling  in  a  perpetual  fall,  and  she, 
forever  caught,  forever  left  behind,  got  away  from  them,  all 
the  same,  by  the  clever  furrow  she  made  in  her  wake,  which 
sucked  their  rage  away.  And  in  this  flying  pace  what  they 


164  ESSAYS   IN   LONDON  AND   ELSEWHERE 

were  conscious  of  above  all  was  the  sense  of  lightness  ;  they 
felt  themselves  spring,  without  trouble  or  effort.  When  the 
Marie  rose  on  the  billows  it  was  without  a  shock,  as  if  the 
wind  had  lifted  her  ;  and  then  her  descent  was  like  a  slide. 
.  .  .  She  seemed  to  be  sliding  backwards,  the  fleeing  moun 
tain  falling  away  from  under  her  to  rush  onward,  while  she 
dropped  into  one  of  the  great  hollows  that  were  also  rushing. 
She  touched  its  terrible  bottom  without  a  hurt,  in  a  splash  of 
water  which  didn't  even  wet  her,  but  which  fled  like  all  the 
rest — fled  and  fainted  ahead,  like  smoke,  like  nothing.  In  the 
depth  of  these  hollows  it  was  darker,  and  after  each  wave  had 
passed  they  watched  the  next  coming  on  behind  —  the  next 
bigger  and  higher,  green  and  transparent,  which  hurried  up 
with  furious  contortions,  scrolls  almost  closing  over  and  seeming 
to  say,  '  Wait  till  I  catch  you — till  I  swallow  you  up  !'  But  it 
didn't  catch  you  ;  it  only  lifted  you  as  you  lift  a  feather  in 
shrugging  your  shoulders,  and  you  felt  it  pass  under  you  al 
most  gently,  with  its  gushing  foam,  the  crash  of  a  cascade." 

"  Mon  Frere  Yves  "  and  "  Pecheur  d'lslande  "  are 
full  of  pages  as  vivid  as  that,  which  seem  to  us  to 
place  the  author  among  the  very  first  of  sea-painters. 

"  You  made  out  thousands  of  voices  [in  the  huge  clamor 
of  a  storm  in  Northern  seas],  those  above  either  shrill  or  deep 
and  seeming  distant  from  being  so  big :  that  was  the  wind, 
the  great  soul  of  the  uproar,  the  invisible  power  that  carried 
on  the  whole  thing.  It  was  dreadful,  but  there  were  other 
sounds  as  well,  closer,  more  material,  more  bent  on  destruction, 
given  out  by  the  torment  of  the  water,  which  crackled  as  if 
on  live  coals.  And  it  grew  and  still  grew.  In  spite  of  their 
flying  pace  the  sea  began  to  cover  them,  to  '  eat  them  up,'  as 
they  said  ;  first  the  spray,  whipping  them  from  aft,  then  great 
bundles  of  water  hurled  with  a  force  that  might  smash  every 
thing.  The  waves  grew  higher  and  still  crazily  higher,  and  yet 
they  were  ravelled  as  they  came  and  you  saw  them  hanging 


PIERRE    LOTI  165 

about  in  great  green  tatters,  which  were  the  falling  water 
scattered  by  the  wind.  It  fell  in  heavy  masses  on  the  deck, 
with  the  sound  of  a  whack,  and  then  the  Marie  shuddered  all 
over,  as  if  in  pain.  Now  you  could  make  out  nothing  more, 
on  account  of  this  drift  of  white  slobber  ;  when  the  gusts 
groaned  afresh  you  saw  it  borne  in  thicker  clouds,  like  the 
dust  on  the  roads  in  summer.  A  heavy  rain  which  had  come 
on  now  passed  aslant,  almost  horizontal,  and  all  these  things 
hissed  together,  lashing  and  wounding  like  stripes." 

The  English  reader  may  see  in  such  passages  as 
these  what  the  English  reader  is  rather  apt  to  see  in 
any  demonstrative  view  of  difficulty  or  danger,  any 
tendency  to  insist  that  a  storm  is  bad  or  a  mountain 
steep  —  a  nervous  exaggeration,  the  emotion  of  one 
who  is  not  as  Englishmen  are.  But  Pierre  Loti  has 
many  other  things  to  say  of  the  ocean  than  that  it 
is  a  terrible  place,  and  of  strange  countries  than  that 
it  is  a  mercy  one  ever  gets  there,  and  the  descriptions 
I  have  quoted  are  chosen  at  hazard.  "  It  always 
came  to  an  end  suddenly  [the  hot,  tropical  rain] ;  the 
black  curtain  drew  away  slowly,  dragging  its  train 
over  the  turquoise-tinted  sea  •  the  splendid  light 
came  forth  more  astounding  after  the  darkness,  and 
the  great  equatorial  sun  drank  up  fast  all  the  water 
we  had  taken  ;  the  sails,  the  wood  of  the  ship,  the 
awnings  recovered  their  whiteness  in  the  sunshine  ; 
the  Sibyl  put  on  altogether  the  bright  color  of  a 
dry  thing  in  the  midst  of  the  great  blue  monotony 
that  stretched  around  her."  Pierre  Loti  speaks  bet 
ter  than  of  anything  else  of  the  ocean,  the  thing  in 
the  world  that,  after  the  human  race,  has  most  in 
tensity  and  variety  of  life ;  but  he  renders  with  ex- 


1 66  ESSAYS   IN   LONDON   AND   ELSEWHERE 

traordinary  felicity  all  the  poetry  of  association,  all 
the  touching  aspects  and  suggestions  in  persons, 
places,  and  objects  connected  with  it,  whose  essential 
character  is  that  they  are  more  or  less  its  sport  and 
its  victims.  There  is  always  a  charming  pity  and  a 
kind  of  filial  passion  in  his  phrase  when  it  rests 
upon  the  people  and  things  of  his  wind-swept  and 
wave-washed  Brittany.  The  literature  of  our  day 
contains  nothing  more  beautiful  than  the  Breton  pas 
sages,  as  they  may  be  called,  of  "  Mon  Frere  Yves  " 
and  "  Pecheur  dTslande."  There  is  a  sentence  in 
the  former  of  these  tales,  in  reference  to  the  inde 
finable  sweetness  of  the  short-lived  Breton  summer, 
which  constitutes  a  sort  of  image  of  the  attraction  of 
his  style.  "  A  compound  of  a  hundred  things ;  the 
charm  of  the  long,  mild  days,  rarer  than  elsewhere 
and  sooner  gone ;  the  deep,  fresh  grasses,  with  their 
extreme  profusion  of  pink  flowers ;  and  then  the 
sense  of  other  years  which  sleeps  there,  spread 
through  everything."  All  this  is  in  Pierre  Loti,  the 
mildness  and  sadness,  the  profusion  of  pink  flowers, 
and  that  implication  of  other  conditions  at  any  mo 
ment,  which  is  the  innermost  note  of  the  voice  of  the 
sea.  When  Gaud,  in  "  Pecheur  d'Islande,"  takes 
her  walk  to  the  dreary  promontory  where  she  hopes 
she  may  meet  her  lover,  "there  were  no  more  trees  at 
all  now,  nothing  but  the  bare  heath,  with  its  green 
furze,  and  here  and  there  the  divine  crucified  cut 
ting  out  the  great  arms  of  their  crosses  against  the 
sky  and  making  the  whole  region  look  like  an  im 
mense  place  of  justice."  Too  long  to  quote  in  their 


PIERRE    LOTI  167 

fulness  are  the  two  admirable  pages  in  the  early 
part  of  the  history  of  Gaud  and  Yann  about  the 
winter  festival  of  the  pardon  of  the  fishermen,  with 
Paimpol  full  of  "the  sound  of  bells  and  the  chant 
of  priests,  the  rude  and  monotonous  songs  of  the 
taverns  —  old  airs  to  cradle  sailors,  old  complaintes 
brought  from  the  sea,  brought  from  I  know  not 
where,  from  the  deep  night  of  time";  full  of  "old 
granite  houses,  shutting  in  the  swarm  of  the  crowd ; 
old  roofs  that  told  the  story  of  their  centuries  of 
struggle  against  the  west  winds,  the  salt  spray,  the 
rains,  everything  that  the  sea  brings  to  bear  ;  the 
story,  too,  of  the  warm  episodes  they  had  sheltered, 
old  adventures  of  daring  and  love."  Easier  to  repro 
duce,  in  its  concision,  is  the  description  of  the  day, 
the  last  day,  before  Yann  Gaos  goes  forth  on  the 
ill-starred  expedition  from  which  he  never  returns: 

"  There  was  no  wind  from  any  quarter.  The  sea  had  turned 
very  gentle  ;  it  was  everywhere  of  the  same  pale  blue  and  re 
mained  perfectly  quiet.  The  sun  shone  with  a  great  white 
brightness,  and  the  rough  Breton  land  soaked  itself  in  the  light 
as  in  something  fine  and  rare  ;  it  seemed  to  feel  a  cheer  and  a 
refreshment  even  to  its  far-away  distances.  The  air  was  deli- 
ciously  tepid  and  smelt  of  summer  ;  you  would  have  said  that 
it  had  stilled  itself  forever,  that  there  never  again  would  be 
dark  days  or  tempests.  The  capes,  the  bays,  without  the 
changing  shadows  of  the  clouds,  drew  out  in  the  sunshine  their 
great  motionless  lines.  They,  too,  appeared  given  up  to  endless 
rest  and  tranquillity.  .  .  .  On  the  edges  of  the  ways  you 
saw  little  hasty  flowers,  primroses  and  violets,  pale  and  with 
out  scent." 

"  Madame   Chrysantheme,"  the  history  of  a  sum- 


1 68  ESSAYS   IN   LONDON   AND   ELSEWHERE 

mer  spent  in  very  curious  conditions  at  Nagasaki, 
the  latest  of  the  author's  productions  and  the  most 
distinctively  amusing,  has  less  spontaneity  than  its 
predecessors,  and  seems  more  calculated,  more  made 
to  order ;  but  it  abounds  in  unsurpassable  little 
vignettes,  of  which  the  portrait  of  certain  Japanese 
ladies  of  quality  whom  he  met  at  the  photographer's 
is  a  specimen: 

"I  couldn't  satiate  my  desire  to  look  at  these  two  creatures; 
they  captivated  me  like  incomprehensible  things  that  one  had 
never  seen.  Their  fragile  bodies,  outlandishly  graceful  in  post 
ure,  are  drowned  in  stiff  materials  and  redundant  sashes,  of 
which  the  ends  droop  like  tired  wings.  They  make  me  think, 
I  don't  know  why,  of  great,  rare  insects;  the  extraordinary 
patterns  on  their  garments  have  something  of  the  dark  bedizen- 
ment  of  night-butterflies.  Above  all,  there  is  the  mystery  of 
their  quite  small  eyes,  drawn  back  and  up  so  far  that  the  lids 
are  tight  and  they  can  scarcely  open  ;  the  mystery  of  their  ex 
pression,  which  seems  to  denote  inner  thoughts  of  a  cold,  vague 
complacency  of  absurdity  —  a  world  of  ideas  absolutely  closed 
to  ourselves." 

It  may  be  that  many  an  English  reader  will  not 
recognize  Pierre  Loti  as  a  man  of  action  who  hap 
pens  to  have  a  genius  for  literary  expression,  the 
account  he  himself  gives  of  his  exploits  not  being 
such  as  we  associate  with  that  character.  The  term 
action  has  a  wide  signification,  but  there  are  some 
kinds  of  life  which  it  represents  to  us  certainly  much 
less  than  others.  The  exploits  of  the  author  of 
"  Madame  Chrysantheme,"  of  "  Ayizade,"  of  "  Ra- 
rahu,"  of  "  Le  Roman  d'un  Spahi,"  and  "  Pasquala 
Ivanovitch,"  are — I  hardly  know  what  to  call  them, 


PIERRE    LOTI  169 

for  we  scarcely  mention  achievements  of  this  order 
in  English — more  relaxing  on  the  whole  than  tonic. 
An  author  less  tonic  than  Pierre  Loti  can  indeed 
not  well  be  imagined,  and  the  English  reader  ought 
already  to  have  been  notified  (the  plainest  good  faith 
requires  it  and  I  have  delayed  much  too  long)  that 
a  good  deal  of  what  he  has  to  tell  us  relates  mainly 
to  his  successes  among  the  ladies.  We  have  a  great 
and  I  think  a  just  dislike  to  the  egotistic-erotic,  to 
literary  confidences  on  such  points,  and  when  a  gen 
tleman  abounds  in  them  the  last  thing  we  take  him 
for  is  a  real  man  of  action.  It  must  be  confessed 
that  Pierre  Loti  abounds,  though  his  two  best  books 
are  not  autobiographical,  and  there  is  simply  noth 
ing  to  reply  to  any  English  reader  who  on  ascertain 
ing  this  circumstance  may  declare  that  he  desires 
to  hold  no  commerce  with  him  ;  nothing,  that  is,  but 
the  simple  remark  that  such  a  reader  will  lose  a 
precious  pleasure.  This  warning,  however,  is  a  trifle 
to  the  really  scandalized.  I  maintain  my  epithet,  at 
any  rate,  and  I  should  desire  no  better  justification 
for  it  than  such  an  admirable  piece  as  the  "  Corvee 
Matinale,"  in  the  volume  entitled  "  Propos  d'Exil," 
which  describes  how  the  author  put  off  at  dawn 
from  a  French  ship  of  war,  in  a  small  boat  with  a 
handful  of  men,  to  row  up  a  river  on  the  coast  of 
Anam  and  confer,  with  a  view  of  bringing  them 
promptly  to  terms,  with  the  authorities  of  the  queer 
est  of  little  Asiatic  towns.  A  writer  is  to  my  sense 
quite  man  of  action  enough  when  he  has  episodes 
like  that  to  relate  ;  they  give  a  sufficient  perfection 


170  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON    AND    ELSEWHERE 

to  the  conjunction  of  the  "chance"  and  the  pictorial 
view.  Danger  has  nothing  to  do  with  it ;  the  man 
ner  in  which  M.  Loti  gives  us  on  this  occasion  the 
impression  of  an  almost  grotesque  absence  of  dan 
ger,  of  ugly  mandarins  superfluously  frightened  as 
well  as  of  the  color  and  temperature  of  the  whole 
scene,  the  steaming  banks  of  the  river,  with  flat 
Asiatic  faces  peeping  out  of  the  rushes,  the  squalid, 
fetid  crowds,  the  shabby,  contorted  pagodas,  with 
precious  little  objects  glimmering  in  the  shade  of 
their  open  fronts — the  vividness  of  all  these  sugges 
tions  is  the  particular  sign  of  this  short  masterpiece. 
The  same  remark  applies  to  the  "  Pagodes  Souter- 
raines,"  in  the  same  volume — the  story,  told  with  ad 
mirable  art,  of  an  excursion,  while  the  ship  lingers 
exasperatingly  on  the  same  hot,  insufferable  coast,  to 
visit  certain  marvellous  old  tombs  and  temples,  hewn 
out  of  a  mountain  of  pink  marble,  filled  with  horri 
ble  monstrous  effigies  and  guarded  by  bonzes  almost 
as  uncanny.  The  appreciation  of  the  exotic,  which 
M.  Jules  Lemaitre  marks  as  Loti's  distinguishing 
sign,  finds  perfect  expression  in  such  pages  as  these. 
There  are  many  others  of  the  same  sort  in  the 
"  Propos  d'Exil,"  which  is  a  chaplet  of  pearls  ;  but 
perhaps  the  book  is  above  all  valuable  for  the  sketch 
entitled  "Un  Vieux" — the  picture  of  the  old  age, 
dreary  and  lamentable,  of  a  worn-out  mariner  who 
has  retired  on  his  pension  to  a  cottage  in  the  sub 
urbs  of  Brest.  It  has  delicate  sentiment  as  well  as 
an  extraordinary  objective  reality ;  but  it  is  not  sen 
timental,  for  it  is  characterized  by  an  ineffable  pes- 


PIERRE   LOTI  171 

simism  and  a  close,  fascinated  notation  of  the  inex 
orable  stages  by  which  lonely  and  vacant  old  age 
moulders  away,  with  its  passions  dying,  dying  very 
hard.  "  Un  Vieux  "  is  singularly  ugly,  and  "  Pecheur 
d'Islande  "  is  singularly  beautiful ;  but  I  should  be 
tempted  to  say  that  in  Pierre  Loti's  work  "Un 
Vieux"  is  the  next  finest  thing  to  "Pecheur  d'Isl 
ande."  "Mon  Frere  Yves"  is  full  of  beauty,  but 
it  carries  almost  to  a  maximum  the  author's  charac 
teristic  defect,  the  absence  of  composition,  the  de- 
cousu  quality  which  makes  each  of  his  productions 
appear  at  first  a  handful  of  flying  leaves.  "  Un 
Vieux"  has  a  form  as  a  whole,  though  it  occurs  to 
me  that,  perhaps,  it  is  surpassed  in  this  respect  by 
another  gem  of  narration  or  description,  the  best 
pages  of  the  "  Fleurs  d'Ennui."  (We  hesitate  for  a 
word  when  it  is  a  question  mainly  of  rendering,  as 
Loti  renders  it,  the  impression,  of  giving  the  material 
illusion,  of  a  strange  place  and  strange  manners.) 
I  leave  to  the  impartial  reader  to  judge  whether 
"  Les  Trois  Dames  de  la  Kasbah,"  the  gem  in  ques 
tion  (it  has  been  extracted  from  the  "  Fleurs  d'En- 
flui"  and  published  in  a  pretty  little  volume  by 
itself),  is  more  or  only  is"  less  ugly  than  "  Un  Vieux." 
That  will  depend  a  good  deal  on  whether  he  be 
shocked  by  the  cynicism  of  the  most  veracious  of 
all  possible  representations  of  the  adventures  of  a 
band  of  drunken  sailors  during  a  stuffy  night  at 
Algiers.  Such,  and  nothing  more  (the  adventures 
are  of  the  least  edifying,  and  the  dbnofiment  is  not 
even  mentionable  to  ears  polite),  is  the  subject  of 


172  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON    AND    ELSEWHERE 

"  Les  Trois  Dames  de  la  Kasbah,  Conte  Oriental " ; 
and  yet  the  life,  the  spirit,  the  color,  the  communi 
cative  tone,  the  truth  and  poetry  of  this  little  pro 
duction  are  such  that  one  cannot  conscientiously 
relegate  it  (one  wishes  one  could)  to  a  place  even 
of  comparative  obscurity. 

If  our  author's  ruling  passion  is  the  appreciation 
of  the  exotic,  it  is  not  in  his  first  works  that  he  con 
fines  his  quest  to  funny  calls  on  nervous  mandarins, 
to  the  twilight  gloom  of  rheumatic  old  sailors  or  the 
vulgar  pranks  of  reckless  young  ones.  "  Le  Roman 
d'un  Spahi,"  "Ayizade,"  and  "Rarahu"  each  contain 
the  history  of  a  love-affair  with  a  primitive  woman 
or  a  combination  of  primitive  women.  There  is  a 
kind  of  complacent  animalism  in  them  which  makes 
it  difficult  to  speak  of  them  as  the  perfection  of 
taste,  and  I  profess  to  be  able  to  defend  them  on 
the  ground  of  taste  only  so  long  as  they  are  not 
attacked.  The  great  point  is  that  they  will  not  be 
attacked  by  any  one  who  is  capable  of  feeling  the 
extraordinary  power  of  evocation  of  (for  instance) 
"  Le  Mariage  de  Loti "  (another  name  for  "  Rara 
hu"),  at  the  same  time  that  he  recognizes  the  ab 
normal  character  of  such  a  performance,  a  charac 
ter  the  more  marked  as  the  feeling  of  youth  is  strong 
in  these  early  volumes,  and  the  young  person  has 
rarely  M.  Loti's  assurance  as  a  viveur.  He  betrays 
a  precocity  of  depravity  which  is  disconcerting.  I 
write  the  gross  word  depravity  because  we  must  put 
the  case  against  him  (so  many  English  readers  would 
feel  it  that  way)  as  strongly  as  it  can  be  put.  It 


PIERRE    LOTI  173 

doesn't  put  it  strongly  enough  to  say  that  the  serene 
surrender  to  polygamous  practices  among  coral-reefs 
and  in  tepid  seas  is  a  sign  much  rather  of  primitive 
innocence,  for  there  is  an  element  in  the  affair  that 
vitiates  the  argument.  This  is  simply  that  the  se 
renity  (which,  I  take  it,  most  makes  the  innocence) 
cannot  under  the  circumstances  be  adequate.  The 
pen,  the  talent,  the  phrase,  the  style,  the  note-book 
take  care  of  that  and  change  the  whole  situation  ; 
they  invalidate  the  plea  of  the  primitive.  They  in 
troduce  the  conscious  element,  and  that  is  the  weak 
side  of  Loti's  spontaneities  and  pastorals.  What 
saves  him  is  that  his  talent  never  falters,  and  this 
is  but  another  illustration  of  his  interesting  double 
nature.  His  customs  and  those  of  his  friends  at 
Tahiti,  at  Stamboul,  on  the  east  coast  of  the  Adri 
atic,  or  again,  according  to  his  latest  work,  at  Na 
gasaki,  are  not  such  as  we  associate  in  the  least 
with  high  types ;  and  yet  when  we  close  these  va 
rious  records  of  the  general  activity  known  as  the 
attitude  of  "  conquest,"  the  impression  that  abides 
with  us  is  one  of  surpassing  delicacy.  The  facts 
are  singularly  vulgar,  in  spite  of  the  exotic  glow 
that  wraps  them  up  ;  but  the  subjective  side  of  the 
business,  the  author's  imagination,  has  an  extraor 
dinary  light.  Few  things  could  suggest  more  the 
value  that  we  instinctively  attach  to  a  high  power 
of  evocation — the  degree  to  which  we  regard  it  as 
precious  in  itself. 

What  makes  the  facts  vulgar,  what  justifies  us  in 
applying  to  Loti's  picture  of  himself  an  ironic  epi- 


174  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND   ELSEWHERE 

thet  or  two,  is  his  almost  inveterate  habit  of  repre 
senting  the  closest  and  most  intimate  personal  rela 
tions  as  unaccompanied  with  any  moral  feeling,  any 
impulse  of  reflection  or  reaction.  He  has  so  often 
the  air  of  not  seeming  to  talk  of  affection  when  he 
talks  of  love — that  oddest  of  all  French  literary  char 
acteristics,  and  one  to  which  we  owe  the  circum 
stance  that  whole  volumes  have  been  written  on  the 
latter  of  these  principles  without  an  allusion  to  the 
former.  There  is  a  moral  feeling  in  the  singular 
friendship  of  which  "Mon  Frere  Yves"  is  mainly  a 
masterly  commemoration,  and  also  a  little  in  the 
hindered  passion  which  at  last  unites,  for  infinite 
disaster,  alas  !  the  hero  and  heroine  of  "  Pecheur 
d'Islande."  These  are  the  exceptions  ;  they  are  ad 
mirable  and  reassuring.  The  closer,  the  more  inti 
mate  is  a  personal  relation  the  more  we  look  in  it 
for  the  human  drama,  the  variations  and  complica 
tions,  the  note  of  responsibility  for  which  we  appeal 
in  vain  to  the  loves  of  the  quadrupeds.  Failing  to 
satisfy  us  in  this  way,  such  a  relation  is  not,  as  Mr. 
Matthew  Arnold  says  of  American  civilization,  in 
teresting.  M.  Pierre  Loti  is  too  often  guilty  of  the 
simplicity  of  assuming  that  when  exhibited  on  his 
own  part  it  is  interesting.  I  should  make  a  point 
of  parenthesizing  that  the  picture  of  the  passion 
which  holds  together  in  an  immortal  embrace  the 
two  great  figures  of  "Pecheur  d'Islande"  is  essen 
tially  a  picture  of  affection.  "Rarahu"  is  a  won 
derful  extension  of  the  reader's  experience — a  study 
of  the  nonchalance  of  the  strange,  attractive  Maori 


PIERRE    LOTI  175 

race  and  the  private  life  of  Polynesia.  The  impres 
sion  is  irresistible  and  the  transfusion  of  our  con 
sciousness,  as  one  may  say,  effected  without  the  waste 
of  a  drop.  The  case  is  the  same  with  "  Ayizade', " 
and  the  transfusion  this  time  is  into  a  more  capa 
cious  recipient.  "  Ayizade  "  relates  the  adventures 
of  a  French  naval  officer  who  spends  a  winter,  at 
Salonica  and  Constantinople,  in  the  tolerably  suc 
cessful  effort  to  pass  (not  only  in  the  eyes  of  others 
but  in  his  very  own)  for  a  Turk,  and  a  Turk  of  the 
people  moreover,  with  the  ingrained  superstitions 
and  prejudices.  He  secures  in  this  experiment  the 
valuable  assistance  of  sundry  unconventional  per 
sons  (for  his  ideal  is  the  Bohemian  Turk,  if  the  ex 
pression  may  be  used),  foremost  of  whom  is  the  lady, 
the  wife  of  a  rich  and  respectable  Mussulman,  who 
gives  her  name  to  the  book.  It  is  for  M.  Loti  him 
self  to  have  judged  whether  the  results  were  worth 
the  trouble ;  the  great  point  is  that  his  reader  feels 
that  he  has  them,  in  their  reality,  without  the  trouble, 
and  is  beholden  to  the  author  accordingly  for  one  of 
the  greatest  of  literary  pleasures.  M.  Jules  Lemaitre, 
whom  it  is  difficult  not  to  quote  in  speaking  of  any 
writer  of  whom  he  has  spoken,  gives  "  Ayizade " 
the  high  praise  of  being  the  finest  case  of  enlarged 
sympathy  that  he  knows,  and  the  most  successful 
effort  at  changing  one's  skin.  Commendation  of  this 
order  it  doubtless  deserves,  equally  with  "  Le  Mariage 
de  Loti,"  in  spite  of  the  infirmity  I  have  hinted  at, 
the  fact  that  the  interest  is  supposed  largely  to  be 
attached  to  a  close  personal  relation  which  is  not 


176  ESSAYS    IN   LONDON  AND   ELSEWHERE 

quite  human,  which  is  too  simplified,  too  much  like 
the  loves  of  the  quadrupeds.  The  desire  to  change 
his  skin  is  frequent  with  M.  Loti,  and  it  has  this  odd 
ity  that  his  preference  is  almost  always  for  a  dusky 
one.  We  rarely  see  him  attempt  to  assume  the  com 
plexion  of  one  of  the  fairer  races — of  the  English 
for  instance,  the  fairest  perhaps  of  all.  He  indulges 
indeed  in  the  convenient  fiction  that  the  personage 
of  whom  Loti  was  originally  the  nom  de  guerre  is  Mr. 
Harry  Grant,  a  midshipman  in  her  Majesty's  service ; 
but  this  device  is  perfunctory  and  the  identity  is  not 
maintained.  Nothing  could  illustrate  more  our  au 
thor's  almost  impertinent  amateurishness  and  laxity 
of  composition,  as  well  as  the  circumstance  that  we 
forgive  it  at  every  step,  than  the  artless  confusion 
which  runs  through  all  his  volumes  in  regard  to  such 
identities.  They  don't  signify,  and  it  is  all,  as  his 
own  idiom  has  it,  sewn  with  white  thread.  Loti  is 
at  once  the  pseudonym  of  M.  Julien  Viaud  and  the 
assumed  name  of  the  hero  of  a  hundred  more  or 
less  scandalous  anecdotes.  Suddenly  he  ceases  to 
be  Harry  Grant  and  becomes  an  officer  in  the  French 
navy.  The  brother  Yves  is  one  person  in  the  charm 
ing  book  which  bears  his  name,  and  another  (appar 
ently)  in  "  Madame  Chrysantheme."  The  name  be 
comes  generic  and  represents  any  convivial  Breton 
sailor.  A  curious  shadow  called  Plumkett — a  naval 
comrade — wanders  vaguely  in  and  out  of  almost  all 
the  books,  in  relations  incompatible  with  each  other. 
The  odd  part  of  it  is  that  this  childish  confusion 
does  not  only  not  take  from  our  pleasure,  but  does 


PIERRE    LOTI  177 

not  even  take  from  our  sense  of  the  author's  talent. 
It  is  another  of  the  things  which  prove  Loti's  charm 
to  be  essentially  a  charm  absolute,  a  charm  outside 
of  the  rules,  outside  of  logic,  and  independent  of 
responsibility. 

In  "  Madame  Chrysantheme  "  the  periodical  experi 
ment  is  Japanese,  the  effort  on  Loti's  part  has  been 
to  saturate  with  the  atmosphere  of  Nipon  that  oft- 
soaked  sponge  to  which  I  have  ventured  to  compare 
his  imagination.  His  success  has  not  been  so  great 
as  in  other  cases,  for  the  simple  reason  that  the  Jap 
anese  have  not  rubbed  off  on  him  as  freely  as  the 
Turks  and  the  Tahitans.  The  act  of  sympathy  has 
not  taken  place,  the  experiment  is  comparatively  a 
failure.  The  wringing-out  of  the  sponge  leaves  rath 
er  a  turbid  deposit.  The  author's  taste  is  for  the 
primitive  and  beautiful,  the  large  and  free,  and  the 
Japanese  strike  him  as  ugly  and  complicated,  tiny  and 
conventional.  His  attitude  is  more  profane  than  our 
own  prejudice  can  like  it  to  be  ;  he  quite  declines  to 
take  them  seriously.  The  reproach,  in  general,  to 
which  many  people  would  hold  him  to  be  most  open, 
is  that  he  takes  seriously  people  and  things  which 
deserve  it  less.  I  may  be  altogether  mistaken,  but 
we  treat  ourselves  to  the  conviction  that  he  fails  of 
justice  to  the  wonderful  little  people  who  have  re 
newed,  for  Europe  and  America,  the  whole  idea  of 
Taste.  It  occurs  to  us  for  the  first  time  that  he  is 
partially  closed,  slightly  narrow,  he  whose  very  pro 
fession  it  is  to  be  accessible  to  extreme  strangeness, 
and  we  feel,  as  devoted  readers,  a  certain  alarm. 
12 


178  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

We  ask  ourselves  whether  the  sponge  has  been  so 
often  dipped  that  it  has  lost  its  retentive  property, 
and  with  an  anxious  desire  for  reassurance  on  this 
point  we  await  his  next  production. 

It  is,  however,  singularly  out  of  place  to  talk  of 
what  Pierre  Loti  may  next  produce  when  I  have  not 
interrupted  my  general  remarks  to  mention  in  detail 
the  high  claims  of  "  Mon  Frere  Yves  "  and  "  Pecheur 
d'Islande."  It  is  of  these  things  above  all  the  friend 
ly  critic  must  speak  if  he  wishes  to  speak  to  friendly 
ears.  If  our  author  had  written  his  other  books  and 
not  written  these  he  would  have  been  a  curious  and 
striking  figure  in  literature;  but  the  two  volumes  I 
have  last  named  give  him  a  different  place  altogeth 
er,  and  if  I  had  not  read  and  re-read  them  I  should 
not  have  put  forth  this  general  plea.  "  Mon  Frere 
Yves  "  is  imperfect  (it  is  notably,  for  what  it  is,  too 
long),  and  "  Pecheur  d'Islande  "  is  to  my  sense  per 
fect,  yet  they  have  almost  an  equal  part  in  contribut 
ing  to  their  author's  name  an  association  of  supreme 
beauty.  The  history  of  Marguerite  Mevel  and  Yann 
Gaos  strikes  me  as  one  of  the  very  few  works  of  im 
agination  of  our  day  completely  and  successfully  beau 
tiful.  The  singular  thing  is  that  these  two  tales,  with 
their  far  finer  effect,  differ  onjy  in  degree  from  their 
predecessors,  differ  not  at  all  in  kind.  The  part  of 
them  that  deals  with  the  complicated  heart  is  still 
the  weakest  element;  it  is  still,  as  in  the  others,  the 
senses  that  vibrate  most  (to  every  impression  of  air 
and  climate  and  color  and  weather  and  season) ;  the 
feeling  is  always  the  feeling  of  the  great  earth — the 


PIERRE    LOTI 


I79 


navigator's  earth — as  a  constant  physical  solicitation. 
But  the  picture  in  each  case  has  everything  that  gives 
a  lift  to  that  susceptibility  and  nothing  that  draws  it 
down,  and  the  susceptibility  finds  a  language  which 
fits  it  like  a  glove.  The  impulse  to  be  human  and 
reflective — the  author  has  felt  it,  indeed,  strongly  in 
each  case ;  but  it  is  still  primitive  humanity  that  fas 
cinates  him  most,  and  if  Yves  and  Yann  and  Silves- 
tre  and  Gaud  and  the  old  grandmother  Moan  are 
more  complicated  than  Ayizade  and  Samuel  and 
Achmet  and  Fatou-gaye  and  Rarahu,  they  are  in 
finitely  less  so  than  the  young  people  of  either  sex 
who  supply  the  interest  of  most  valid  works  of  fic 
tion.  "  Pecheur  d'Islande  "  is  the  history  of  a  pas 
sion,  but  of  a  passion  simplified,  in  its  strength,  to 
a  sort  of  community  with  the  winds  and  waves,  the 
blind  natural  forces  hammering  away  at  the  hard  Bre 
ton  country  where  it  is  enacted.  "  Mon  Frere  Yves  " 
relates  the  history  of  an  incorrigible  drunkard  and 
coureur,  a  robust,  delightful  Breton  sailor  who,  in  his 
better  moments,  reads  "  Le  Marquis  de  Villemer" 
and  weeps  over  it.  (There  is  a  sort  of  mystification, 
I  should  remark,  in  this  production,  for  the  English 
reader  at  least,  the  book  being  in  a  large  degree  the 
representation  of  an  intimate  friendship  between  the 
sailor  and  his  superior  officer,  the  spectator  of  his 
career  and  chronicler  of  his  innumerable  relapses. 
Either  the  conditions  which  permit  of  this  particular 
variation  of  discipline  are  not  adequately  explained 
or  the  rigor  of  the  hierarchy  is  less  in  the  French 
service  than  in  others.)  What  strikes  me  in  "  Pe- 


180  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND   ELSEWHERE 

cheur  d'Islande"  is  the  courage  which  has  prompted 
him  to  appeal  to  us  on  behalf  of  a  situation  worn  so 
smooth  by  generations  of  novelists  that  there  would 
seem  to  be  nothing  left  in  it  to  hook  our  attention  to, 
not  to  mention  the  scarcely  less  manifest  fact  that  it 
is  precisely  this  artless  absence  of  suspicion  that  he 
was  attempting  a  tour  de  force  which  has  drawn  down 
the  abundance  of  success.  Yann  Gaos  is  a  magnifi 
cent  young  fisherman  —  magnificent  in  stature  and 
strength,  and  shy  and  suspicious  in  temper — whose 
trade  is  to  spend  his  summer  hauling  up  millions  of 
cod  in  the  cold  and  dangerous  waters  of  the  North. 
He  meets  among  the  coast-folk  of  his  home  a  very 
clever  and  pretty  girl  who  receives  from  him  an  even 
deeper  impression  than  she  gives,  but  with  whom  he 
completely  fails  to  come  to  an  understanding.  The 
understanding  is  delayed  for  two  years  (thanks  largely 
to  an  absence  of  "  manner "  on  either  side),  during 
which  the  girl's  heart  comes  near  to  breaking.  At 
last,  quite  suddenly,  they  find  themselves  face  to  face, 
she  confessing  her  misery  and  he  calling  himself  a 
dolt.  They  are  married  in  a  hurry,  to  have  a  short 
honeymoon  before  he  starts  for  his  annual  cruise  (the 
idea  of  which  fills  her  with  an  irresistible  foreboding), 
and  he  sails  away  to  Iceland  with  his  mates.  She 
waits  in  vain  for  his  return,  and  he  never,  never  comes 
back.  This  is  all  the  tale  can  boast  in  the  way  of 
plot ;  it  is  the  old-fashioned  "  love-story  "  reduced  to 
a  paucity  of  terms.  I  am  sure  M.  Loti  has  no  views 
nor  theories  as  to  what  constitutes  and  does  not  con 
stitute  a  plot ;  he  has  taken  no  precautions,  he  has 


PIERRE    LOTl  l8l 

not  sacrificed  to  any  irritated  divinity,  and  yet  he  has 
filled  the  familiar,  the  faded  materials  with  freshness 
and  meaning.  He  has  appealed  to  us  on  "eternal" 
grounds,  and  besides  the  unconscious  tour  deforce  of 
doing  so  in  this  particular  case  successfully  we  im 
pute  to  him  the  even  more  difficult  feat  of  having 
dispensed  with  the  aid  of  scenery.  His  scenery  is 
exactly  the  absence  of  scenery ;  he  has  placed  his 
two  lovers  in  the  mere  immensity  of  sea  and  sky,  so 
that  they  seem  suspended  in  a  gray,  windy  void.  We 
see  Yann  half  the  time  in  the  perfect  blank  of  fog  and 
darkness.  A  writer  with  a  story  to  tell  that  is  not 
very  fresh  usually  ekes  it  out  by  referring  as  much  as 
possible  to  surrounding  objects.  But  in  this  misty 
medium  there  are  almost  no  surrounding  objects  to 
refer  to,  and  their  isolation  gives  Yann  and  Gaud  a 
kind  of  heroic  greatness.  I  hasten  to  add  that,  of 
course,  the  author  would  not  have  conjured  so  well 
had  he  not  been  an  incomparable  painter  of  the  sea. 
The  book  closes  with  a  passage  of  strange  and  admi 
rable  eloquence,  which  it  seems  to  me  that  no  critic 
speaking  of  it  has  a  right  to  omit  to  quote.  I  should 
say,  as  a  preliminary,  that  in  the  course  of  the  tale 
Yann  Gaos,  "  chaffed  "  by  his  comrades  on  the  ques 
tion  of  his  having  a  sweetheart  and  marrying  her,  has 
declared  that  for  him  there  is  no  woman,  no  wife,  no 
bride,  none  but  the  ocean  to  which  he  is  already 
betrothed.  Also  that  a  vivid  and  touching  incident 
(as-  the  figure  is  also  itself  wonderfully  charming)  is 
that  of  the  young  fisherman  Sylvestre  Moan,  a  cousin 
of  Gaud  and  a  great  friend,  though  younger,  of  Yann, 


182  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON    AND    ELSEWHERE 

who,  called  to  serve  in  the  navy,  is  mortally  wounded 
at  Tonquin,  and,  on  the  fetid  transport  that  brings 
him  home,  dies,  suffocating,  in  the  tropics.  The  au 
thor  relates  how  he  is  buried  on  the  way,  in  a  rank, 
bright  cemetery,  during  a  short  disembarkment  at 
Singapore. 

"Yann  never  came  home.  One  August  night,  out  there  off 
the  coast  of  Iceland,  in  the  midst  of  a  great  fury  of  sound,  were 
celebrated  his  nuptials  with  the  sea — with  the  sea  who  of  old 
had  also  been  his  nurse.  She  had  made  him  a  strong  and  broad- 
chested  youth,  and  then  had  taken  him  in  his  magnificent  man 
hood  for  herself  alone.  A  deep  mystery  had  enveloped  their 
monstrous  nuptials.  Dusky  veils  all  the  while  had  been  shaken 
above  them,  curtains  inflated  and  twisted,  stretched  there  to  hide 
the  feast  ;  and  the  bride  gave  voice  continually,  made  her  loud 
est  horrible  noise  to  smother  the  cries.  He,  remembering  Gaud, 
his  wife  of  flesh,  had  defended  himself,  struggling  like  a  giant, 
against  this  spouse  who  was  the  grave,  until  the  moment  when 
he  let  himself  go,  his  arms  open  to  receive  her,  with  a  great, 
deep  cry  like  the  death-roar  of  a  bull,  his  mouth  already  full  of 
water,  his  arms  open,  stretched  and  stiff  forever.  And  they 
were  all  at  his  wedding — all  those  whom  he  had  bidden  of  old, 
all  except  Sylvestre,  who,  poor  fellow,  had  gone  off  to  sleep  in 
enchanted  gardens  far  away  on  the  other  side  of  the  earth." 

If  it  be  then  a  matter  of  course  in  France  that  a 
fresh  talent  should  present  its  possessor  mainly  as 
one  more  raffin'e  in  the  observation  of  external  things, 
and  also,  I  think  I  may  add,  as  one  more  pessimist 
in  regard  to  the  nature  of  man  and  of  woman,  and  if 
such  a  presumption  appears  to  have  been  confirmed 
by  an  examination  of  Pierre  Loti,  in  spite  of  the  effort 
of  poor  Yves  to  cultivate  his  will  and  of  the  mutual 


PIERRE   LOTI  183 

tenderness  of  Yann  and  Gaud,  our  conclusion,  all  the 
same,  will  not  have  escaped  the  necessity  of  taking 
into  account  the  fact  that  there  still  seems  an  inex 
haustible  life  for  writers  who  obey  this  particular  in 
spiration.  The  Nemesis  remains  very  much  what  I 
attempted  to  suggest  its  being  at  the  beginning  of 
these  remarks,  but  somehow  the  writers  over  whom 
it  hovers  enjoy  none  the  less  remarkable  health  on 
the  side  on  which  they  are  strong.  If  they  have  al-A 
most  nothing  to  show  us  in  the  Avay  of  the  operation 
of  character,  the  possibilities  of  conduct,  the  part 
played  in  the  world  by  the  idea  (you  would  never 
guess,  either  from  Pierre  Loti  or  from  M.  Guy  de 
Maupassant,  that  the  idea  has  any  force  or  any  credit 
in  the  world) ;  if  man,  for  them,  is  the  simple  sport 
of  fate,  with  suffering  for  his  main  sign — either  suf 
fering  or  one  particular  satisfaction,  always  the  same 
— their  affirmation  of  all  this  is  still,  on  the  whole, 
the  most  complete  affirmation  that  the  novel  at  pres 
ent  offers  us.  They  have  on  their  side  the  accident, 
if  accident  it  be,  that  they  never  cease  to  be  artists. 
They  will  keep  this  advantage  till  the  optimists  of 
the  hour,  the  writers  for  whom  the  life  of  the  soul  is 
equally  real  and  visible  (lends  itself  to  effects  and  tri 
umphs,  challenges  the  power  to  "  render  "),  begin  to 
seem  to  them  formidable  competitors.  On  that  day 
it  will  be  very  interesting  to  see  what  line  they  take, 
whether  they  will  throw  up  the  battle,  surrendering 
honorably,  or  attempt  a  change  of  base.  Many  intel 
ligent  persons  hold  that  for  the  French  a  change  of 
base  is  impossible  and  that  they  are  either  what  they 


184  ESSAYS   IN   LONDON   AND   ELSEWHERE 

incessantly  show  themselves  or  nothing.  This  view, 
of  course,  derives  sanction  from  that  awkward  condi 
tion  which  I  have  mentioned  as  attached  to  the  work 
of  those  among  them  who  are  most  conspicuous — the 
fact  that  their  attempts  to  handle  the  life  of  the  spirit 
are  comparatively  so  ineffectual.  On  the  other  hand, 
it  is  terribly  compromising  when  those  who  do  handle 
the  life  of  the  spirit  with  the  manner  of  experience 
fail  to  make  their  affirmation  complete,  fail  to  make 
us  take  them  seriously  as  artists,  and  even  go  so  far 
(some  of  them  are  capable  of  that)  as  to  introduce  the 
ruinous  suggestion  that  there  is  perhaps  some  essen 
tial  reason  (I  scarcely  know  how  to  say  it)  why  ob 
servers  who  are  of  that  way  of  feeling  should  be  a 
little  weak  in  the  conjuring  line.  To  be  even  a  little 
weak  in  representation  is,  of  course,  practically  and 
for  artistic  purposes,  to  be  what  schoolboys  call  a 
duffer,  and  I  merely  glance,  shuddering,  at  such  a 
possibility.  What  would  be  their  Nemesis,  what  pen 
alty  would  such  a  group  have  incurred  in  their  failure 
to  rebut  triumphantly  so  damaging  an  imputation  ? 
Who  would  then  have  to  stand  from  under?  It  is 
not  Pierre  Loti,  at  any  rate,  who  makes  the  urgency 
of  these  questions  a  matter  only  for  the  materialists 
(as  it  is  convenient  to  call  them)  to  consider.  He 
only  adds  to  our  suspicion  that,  for  good  or  for  evil, 
they  have  still  an  irrepressible  life,  and  he  does  so 
the  more  notably  that,  in  his  form  and  seen  as  a 
whole,  he  is  a  renovator,  and,  as  I  may  say,  a  re 
fresher.  He  plays  from  his  own  bat,  imitating  no 
one,  not  even  nearly  or  remotely,  to  my  sense — though 


PIERRE    LOTI  185 

I  have  heard  the  charge  made — Chateaubriand.  He 
arrives  with  his  bundle  of  impressions,  but  they  have 
been  independently  gathered  in  the  world,  not  in  the 
school,  and  it  is  a  coincidence  that  they  are  of  the 
same  order  as  the  others,  expressed  in  their  admira 
ble  personal  way  and  with  an  indifference  to  the  art 
of  transitions  which  is  at  once  one  of  the  most  strik 
ing  cases  of  literary  irresponsibility  that  I  know  and 
one  of  the  finest  of  ingratiation.  He  has  settled 
the  question  of  his  own  superficies  (even  in  the  pa 
thos  of  the  sacred  reunion  of  his  lovers  in  "  Pecheur 
d'Islande  "  there  is  something  inconvertibly  carnal), 
but  he  has  not  settled  the  other,  the  general  question 
of  how  long  and  how  far  accomplished  and  exclusive 
— practically  exclusive  —  impressionism  will  yet  go, 
with  its  vulture  on  its  back  and  feeding  on  it.  I  hope 
I  appear  not  to  speak  too  apocalyptically  in  saying 
that  the  problem  is  still  there  to  minister  to  our  in 
terest  and  perhaps  even  a  little  to  our  anxiety. 

1888. 


THE  JOURNAL  OF  THE  BROTHERS 
DE  GONCOURT 

I  CAN  scarcely  forbear  beginning  these  limited  re 
marks  on  an  interesting  subject  with  a  regret — the 
regret  that  I  had  not  found  the  right  occasion  to 
make  them  two  or  three  years  ago.  This  is  not  be 
cause  since  that  time  the  subject  has  become  less 
attaching,  but  precisely  because  it  has  become  more 
so,  has  become  so  absorbing  that  I  am  oppressively 
conscious  of  the  difficulty  of  treating  it.  It  was  never, 
I  think,  an  easy  one ;  inasmuch  as  for  persons  inter 
ested  in  questions  of  literature,  of  art,  of  form,  in  the 
general  question  of  the  observation  of  life  for  an 
artistic  purpose,  the  appeal  and  the  solicitation  of 
Edmond  and  Jules  de  Goncourt  were  essentially  not 
simple  and  soothing.  The  manner  of  this  extraor 
dinary  pair,  their  temper,  their  strenuous  effort  and 
conscious  system,  suggested  anything  but  a  quick 
solution  of  the  problems  that  seemed  to  hum  in  our 
ears  as  we  read ;  suggested  it  almost  as  little  indeed 
as  their  curious,  uncomfortable  style,  with  its  multi 
plied  touches  and  pictorial  verbosity,  was  apt  to  evoke 
an  immediate  vision  of  the  objects  to  which  it  made 
such  sacrifices  of  the  synthetic  and  the  rhythmic. 


JOURNAL  OF  THE  BROTHERS  DE  GONCOURT   187 

None  the  less,  if  one  liked  them  well  enough  to  per 
sist,  one  ended  by  making  terms  with  them  ;  I  allude 
to  the  liking  as  conditional,  because  it  appears  to  be 
a  rule  of  human  relations  that  it  is  by  no  means  al 
ways  a  sufficient  bond  of  sympathy  for  people  to  care 
for  the  same  things  :  there  may  be  so  increasing  a 
divergence  when  they  care  for  them  in  different  ways. 
The  great  characteristic  of  the  way  of  the  brothers 
De  Goncourt  was  that  it  was  extraordinarily  "mod 
ern  " ;  so  illustrative  of  feelings  that  had  not  yet  found 
intense  expression  in  literature  that  it  made  at  last 
the  definite  standpoint,  the  common  ground  and  the 
clear  light  for  taking  one's  view  of  them.  They  bris 
tled  (the  word  is  their  own)  with  responsible  profes 
sions,  and  took  us  farther  into  the  confidence  of  their 
varied  sensibility  than  we  always  felt  it  important 
to  penetrate  ;  but  the  formula  that  expressed  them 
remained  well  in  sight.  They  were  historians  and 
observers  who  were  painters ;  they  composed  biogra 
phies,  they  told  stories,  with  the  palette  always  on 
their  thumb. 

Now,  however,  all  that  is  changed  and  the  case  is 
infinitely  more  complicated.  M.  Edmond  de  Gon 
court  has  published,  at  intervals  of  a  few  months,  the 
Journal  kept  for  twenty  years  by  his  brother  and 
himself,  and  the  Journal  makes  all  the  difference. 
The  situation  was  comparatively  manageable  before, 
but  now  it  strikes  us  as  extremely  embarrassing. 
M.  Edmond  de  Goncourt  has  mixed  the  cards  in  the 
most  extraordinary  way ;  he  has  shifted  his  position 
with  a  carelessness  of  consequences  of  which  I  know 


1 88  ESSAYS   IN   LONDON   AND   ELSEWHERE 

no  other  example.  Who  can  recall  an  instance  of  an 
artist's  having  it  in  his  power  to  deprive  himself  of 
the  advantage  of  the  critical  perspective  in  which  he 
stands,  and  being  eager  to  use  that  power  ? 

That  MM.  de  Goncourt  should  have  so  faithfully 
carried  on  their  Journal  is  a  very  interesting  and 
remarkable  fact,  as  to  which  there  will  be  much  to 
say ;  but  it  has  almost  a  vulgarly  usual  air  in  com 
parison  with  the  circumstance  that  one  of  them  has 
judged  best  to  give  the  document  to  the  light.  If  it 
be  true  that  the  elder  and  surviving  brother  has  held 
a  part  of  it  back,  that  only  adds  to  the  judicious, 
responsible  quality  of  the  act.  He  has  selected,  and 
that  indicates  a  plan  and  constitutes  a  presumption 
of  sanity.  There  has  been,  so  to  speak,  a  method  in 
M.  Edmond  de  Goncourt's  madness.  I  use  the  term 
madness  because  it  so  conveniently  covers  most  of 
the  ground.  How  else  indeed  should  one  express  it 
when  a  man  of  talent  defaces  with  his  own  hand  not 
only  the  image  of  himself  that  public  opinion  has 
erected  on  the  highway  of  literature,  but  also  the  im 
age  of  a  loved  and  lost  partner  who  can  raise  no 
protest  and  offer  no  explanation  ?  If  instead  of  pub 
lishing  his  Journal  M.  de  Goncourt  had  burned  it  up 
we  should  have  been  deprived  of  a  very  curious  and 
entertaining  book ;  but  even  with  that  consciousness 
we  should  have  remembered  that  it  would  have  been 
impertinent  to  expect  him  to  do  anything  else.  Bare 
ly  conceivable  would  it  have  been  had  he  withheld 
the  copious  record  from  the  flames  for  the  perusal  of 
a  posterity  who  would  pass  judgment  on  it  when  he 


JOURNAL   OF   THE    BROTHERS   DE   GONCOURT      189 

himself  should  be  dust.  That  would  have  been  an 
act  of  high  humility — the  sacrifice  of  the  finer  part  of 
one's  reputation  ;  but,  after  all,  a  man  can  commit 
suicide  only  in  his  lifetime,  and  the  example  would 
have  had  its  distinction  on  the  part  of  a  curious  mind 
moved  by  sympathy  with  the  curiosity  of  a  coming 
age. 

If  I  suggest  that  if  it  were  possible  to  us  to  hear 
Jules  de  Goncourt's  voice  to-day  it  might  convey  an 
explanation,  this  perhaps  represents  an  explanation 
as  more  possible  than  we  see  it  as  yet.  Certainly 
it  is  difficult  to  see  it  as  graceful  or  as  conciliatory. 
There  is  scarcely  any  account  we  can  give  of  the  mo 
tive  of  the  act  that  doesn't  make  it  almost  less  an 
occasion  for  complacency  than  the  act  itself.  (I  still 
refer,  of  course,  to  the  publication,  not  to  the  com 
position,  of  the  Journal.  The  composition,  for  ner 
vous,  irritated,  exasperated  characters,  may  have  been 
a  relief — though  even  in  this  light  its  operation  ap 
pears  to  have  been  slow  and  imperfect.  Indeed,  it 
occurs  to  one  that  M.  Edmond  de  Goncourt  may  have 
felt  the  whimsical  impulse  to  expose  the  fond  remedy 
as  ineffectual.)  If  the  motive  was  not  humility,  not 
mortification,  it  was  something  else — something  that 
we  can  properly  appreciate  only  by  remembering  that 
it  is  not  enough  to  be  proud,  and  that  the  question 
inevitably  comes  up  of  what  one's  pride  is  about.  If 
MM.  de  Goncourt  were  two  almost  furious  nevroses, 
if  the  infinite  vibration  of  their  nerves  and  the  sore 
ness  of  their  sentient  parts  were  the  condition  on 
which  they  produced  many  interesting  books,  the  fact 


I QO  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON  AND    ELSEWHERE 

was  pathetic  and  the  misfortune  great,  but  the  legiti 
macy  of  the  whole  thing  was  incontestable.  People 
are  made  as  they  are  made,  and  some  are  weak  in 
one  way  and  some  in  another.  What  passes  our  com 
prehension  is  the  state  of  mind  in  which  their  weak 
ness  appears  to  them  a  source  of  glory  or  even  of 
dolorous  general  interest.  It  may  be  an  inevitable, 
or  it  may  even  for  certain  sorts  of  production  be  an 
indispensable,  thing  to  be  a  nevrose ;  but  in  what  par 
ticular  juncture  is  it  a  communicable  thing?  M.  de 
Goncourt  not  only  communicates  the  case,  but  insists 
upon  it ;  he  has  done  personally  what  M.  Maxime  du 
Camp  did  a  few  years  ago  for  Gustave  Flaubert  (in 
his  "  Souvenirs  Litteraires ")  when  he  made  known 
to  the  world  that  the  author  of  "  Madame  Bovary  " 
had  epileptic  fits.  The  differences  are  great,  how 
ever,  for  if  we  are  disposed  to  question  M.  du  Camp's 
right  to  put  another  person's  secret  into  circulation, 
we  must  admit  that  he  does  so  with  compunction  and 
mourning.  M.  de  Goncourt,  on  the  other  hand,  waves 
the  banner  of  the  infirmity  that  his  collaborates  shared 
with  him  and  invites  all  men  to  listen  to  the  details. 
About  his  right,  I  hasten  to  add,  so  far  as  he  speaks 
for  himself,  there  is  nothing  dubious,  and  this  puts  us 
in  a  rare  position  for  reading  and  enjoying  his  book. 
We  are  not  accomplices  and  our  honor  is  safe.  Peo 
ple  are  betrayed  by  their  friends,  their  enemies,  their 
biographers,  their  critics,  their  editors,  their  publish 
ers,  and  so  far  as  we  give  ear  in  these  cases  we  are 
not  quite  without  guilt ;  but  it  is  much  plainer  sailing 
when  the  burden  of  defence  rests  on  the  very  suffer- 


JOURNAL  OF  THE  BROTHERS  DE  GONCOURT   19 1 

ers.  What  would  have  been  thought  of  a  friend  or 
an  editor,  what  would  have  been  thought  even  of  an 
enemy,  who  should  have  ventured  to  print  the  Jour 
nal  of  MM.  de  Goncourt? 

The  reason  why  it  must  always  be  asked  in  future, 
with  regard  to  any  appreciation  of  these  gentlemen, 
"  Was  it  formed  before  the  Journal  or  after  the 
Journal  ?"  is  simply  that  this  publication  has  ob 
truded  into  our  sense  of  their  literary  performance 
the  disturbance  of  a  revelation  of  personal  character. 
The  scale  on  which  the  disturbance  presents  itself  is 
our  ground  for  surprise,  and  the  nature  of  the  char 
acter  exhibited  our  warrant  for  regret.  The  compli 
cation  is  simply  that  if  to-day  we  wish  to  judge  the 
writings  of  the  brothers  De  Goncourt  freely,  largely, 
historically,  the  feat  is  almost  impossible.  We  have 
to  reckon  with  a  prejudice — a  prejudice  of  our  own. 
And  that  is  why  a  critic  may  be  sorry  to  have  missed 
the  occasion  of  testifying  to  a  liberal  comprehension 
before  the  prejudice  was  engendered.  Almost  im 
passible,  I  say,  but  fortunately  not  altogether ;  for  is 
it  not  the  very  function  of  criticism  and  the  sign  of 
its  intelligence  to  acquit  itself  honorably  in  embar 
rassing  conditions  and  track  the  idea  with  patience 
just  in  proportion  as  it  is  elusive  ?  The  good  method 
is  always  to  sacrifice  nothing.  Let  us  therefore  not 
regret  too  much  either  that  MM.  de  Goncourt  did 
not  burn  their  Journal  if  they  wished  their  novels 
to  be  liked,  or  that  they  did  not  burn  their  novels  if 
they  wished  their  Journal  to  be  forgotten.  The  diffi 
cult  point  to  deal  with  as  regards  this  latter  produc- 


192  ESSAYS   IN   LONDON   AND   ELSEWHERE 

tion  is  that  it  is  a  journal  of  pretensions ;  for  is  it  not 
a  sound  generalization  to  say  that  when  we  speak  of 
pretensions  we  always  mean  pretensions  exaggerated  ? 
If  the  Journal  sets  them  forth,  it  is  in  the  novels  that 
we  look  to  see  them  justified.  If  the  justification  is 
imperfect,  that  will  not  disgust  us,  for  what  does  the 
disparity  do  more  than  help  to  characterize  our  au 
thors  ?  The  importance  of  their  being  characterized 
depends  largely  on  their  talent  (for  people  engaged 
in  the  same  general  effort  and  interested  in  the  same 
questions),  and  of  a  poverty  of  talent  even  the  reader 
most  struck  with  the  unamiable  way  in  which,  as  dia 
rists,  they  for  the  most  part  use  their  powers  will 
surely  not  accuse  MM.  de  Goncourt.  They  express, 
they  represent,  they  give  the  sense  of  life ;  it  is  not 
always  the  life  that  such  and  such  a  one  of  their  read 
ers  will  find  most  interesting,  but  that  is  his  affair 
and  not  theirs.  Theirs  is  to  vivify  the  picture.  This 
art  they  unmistakably  possess,  and  the  Journal  testi 
fies  to  it  still  more  than  "  Germinie  Lacerteux  "  and 
"  Manette  Salomon  ";  infinitely  more,  I  may  add,  than 
the  novels  published  by  M.  Edmond  de  Goncourt 
since  the  death  of  his  brother. 

I  do  not  pronounce  for  the  moment  either  on  the 
justice  or  the  generosity  of  the  portrait  of  Sainte- 
Beuve  produced  in  the  Journal  by  a  thousand  small 
touches,  entries  made  from  month  to  month  and  year 
to  year,  and  taking  up  so  much  place  in  the  whole 
that  the  representation  of  that  figure  (with  the  Prin 
cess  Mathilde,  Gavarni,  Theophile  Gautier,  and  Gus- 
tave  Flaubert  thrown  in  a  little  behind)  may  almost 


JOURNAL  OF  THE  BROTHERS  DE  GONCOURT   193 

be  said  to  be  the  main  effect  of  the  three  volumes. 
What  is  incontestable  is  the  intensity  of  the  vision, 
the  roundness  of  the  conception,  and  the  way  that 
the  innumerable  little  parts  of  the  image  hang  togeth 
er.  The  Sainte-Beuve  of  MM.  de  Goncourt  may  not 
be  the  real  Sainte-Beuve,  but  he  is  a  wonderfully  pos 
sible  and  consistent  personage.  He  is  observed  with 
detestation,  but  at  least  he  is  observed,  and  the  faculty 
is  welcome  and  rare.  This  is  what  we  mean  by  talent 
—by  having  something  fresh  to  contribute.  Let  us  be 
grateful  for  anything  at  all  fresh  so  long  as  our  grati 
tude  is  not  chilled — a  case  in  which  it  has  always  the 
resource  of  being  silent.  It  is  obvious  that  this  check 
is  constantly  at  hand  in  our  intercourse  with  MM.  de 
Goncourt,  for  the  simple  reason  that,  with  the  great 
est  desire  in  the  world  to  see  all  round,  we  cannot 
rid  ourselves  of  the  superstition  that,  when  all  is  said 
and  done,  art  is  most  in  character  when  it  most  shows 
itself  amiable.  It  is  not  amiable  when  it  is  narrow 
and  exclusive  and  jealous,  when  it  makes  the  deplor 
able  confession  that  it  has  no  secret  for  resisting  ex 
asperation.  It  is  not  the  sign  of  a  free  intelligence  or 
a  rich  life  to  be  hysterical  because  somebody's  work 
whom  you  don't  like  affirms  itself  in  opposition  to 
that  of  somebody  else  whom  you  do ;  but  this  condi 
tion  is  calculated  particularly  little  to  please  when 
the  excitement  springs  from  a  comparison  more  per 
sonal.  It  is  almost  a  platitude  to  say  that  the  artistic 
passion  will  ever  most  successfully  assuage  the  pop 
ular  suspicion  that  there  is  a  latent  cruelty  in  it  when 
it  succeeds  in  not  appearing  to  be  closely  connected 
13 


194  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

with  egotism.  The  uncalculated  trick  played  by  our 
authors  upon  their  reputation  was  to  suppose  that 
their  name  could  bear  such  a  strain.  It  is  tolerably 
clear  that  it  can't,  and  this  is  the  mistake  we  should 
have  to  forgive  them  if  we  proposed  to  consider  their 
productions  as  a  whole.  It  doesn't  cover  all  the 
ground  to  say  that  the  injury  of  their  mistake  is  only 
for  themselves  :  it  is  really  in  some  degree  for  those 
who  take  an  interest  in  the  art  they  practise.  Such 
eccentrics,  such  passionate  seekers,  may  not,  in  Eng 
land  and  America,  be  numerous ;  but  even  if  they  are 
a  modest  band,  their  complaint  is  worth  taking  ac 
count  of.  No  one  can  ever  have  been  nearly  so 
much  interested  in  the  work  of  Edmond  and  Jules 
de  Goncourt  as  these  gentlemen  themselves ;  their 
deep  absorption  in  it,  defying  all  competition,  is  one 
of  the  honorable  sides  of  their  literary  character.  But 
the  general  brotherhood  of  men  of  letters  may  very 
well  have  felt  humiliated  by  the  disclosure  of  such 
wrath  in  celestial,  that  is,  in  analogous  minds.  It  is, 
in  short,  rather  a  shock  to  find  that  artists  who  could 
make  such  a  miniature  of  their  Sainte-Beuve  have 
not  carried  their  delicacy  a  little  further.  It  is  al 
ways  a  pain  to  perceive  that  some  of  the  qualities 
we  prize  don't  imply  the  others. 

What  makes  it  important  not  to  sacrifice  the  Jour 
nal  (to  speak  for  the  present  only  of  that)  is  this 
very  illustration  of  the  degree  to  which,  for  the  inde 
fatigable  diarists,  the  things  of  literature  and  art  are 
the  great  realities.  If  every  genuine  talent  is  for  the 
critic  a  "  case  "  constituted  by  the  special  mixture  of 


JOURNAL   OF   THE    BROTHERS    DE   GONCOURT     195 

elements  and  faculties,  it  is  not  difficult  to  put  one's 
finger  on  the  symptoms  in  which  that  of  these  unani 
mous  brothers  resides.  It  consists  in  their  feeling 
life  so  exclusively  as  a  theme  for  descriptive  picto 
rial  prose.  Their  exclusiveness  is,  so  far  as  I  know, 
unprecedented  ;  for  if  we  have  encountered  men  of 
erudition,  men  of  science  as  deeply  buried  in  learn 
ing  and  in  physics,  we  have  never  encountered  a 
man  of  letters  (our  authors  are  really  one  in  their 
duality)  for  whom  his  profession  was  such  an  ex 
haustion  of  his  possibilities.  Their  friend  and 
countryman  Flaubert  doubtless  gave  himself  up  to 
"  art  "  with  as  few  reservations,  but  our  authors  have 
over  him  exactly  the  superiority  that  the  Journal 
gives  them  :  it  is  a  proof  the  more  of  their  concen 
tration,  of  their  having  drawn  breath  only  in  the 
world  of  subject  and  form.  If  they  are  not  more 
representative,  they  are  at  least  more  convenient  to 
refer  to.  Their  concentration  comes  in  part  from  the 
fact  that  it  is  the  meeting  of  two  natures,  but  this 
also  would  have  counted  in  favor  of  expansion,  of 
leakage.  "  Collaboration  "  is  always  a  mystery,  and 
that  of  MM.  de  Goncourt  was  probably  close  beyond 
any  other  ;  but  we  have  seen  the  process  successful 
several  times,  so  that  the  real  wonder  is  not  that  in 
this  case  the  parties  to  it  should  have  been  able  to 
work  together,  to  divide  the  task  without  dividing 
the  effect,  but  rather  that  nature  should  have  struck 
off  a  double  copy  of  a  rare  original.  An  original  is 
a  conceivable  thing,  but  a  pair  of  originals  who  are 
original  in  exactly  the  same  way  is  a  phenomenon 


196  ESSAYS    IN   LONDON   AND   ELSEWHERE 

embodied  so  far  as  I  know  only  in  the  authors  of 
"  Manette  Salomon."  The  relation  borne  by  their 
feelings  on  the  question  of  art  and  taste  to  their 
other  feelings  (which  they  assure  us  were  very  much 
less  identical),  this  peculiar  proportion  constitutes 
their  originality.  In  whom  was  ever  the  group  of 
"  other  feelings "  proportionately  so  small  ?  In 
whom  else  did  the  critical  vibration  (in  respect  to 
the  things  cared  for,  limited  in  number,  even  very 
limited,  I  admit)  represent  so  nearly  the  totality  of 
emotion?  The  occasions  left  for  MM.  de  Goncourt 
to  vibrate  differently  were  so  few  that  they  scarcely 
need  be  counted. 

The  manifestation  of  life  that  most  appeals  to 
them  is  the  manifestation  of  Watteau,  of  Lancret,  of 
Boucher,  of  Fragonard ;  they  are  primarily  critics  of 
pictorial  art  (with  sympathies  restricted  very  much 
to  a  period)  whose  form  of  expression  happens  to 
be  literary,  but  whose  sensibility  is  the  sensibility 
of  the  painter  and  the  sculptor,  and  whose  attempt, 
allowing  for  the  difference  of  the  instrument,  is  to 
do  what  the  painter  and  the  sculptor  do.  The  most 
general  stricture  to  be  made  on  their  work  is  prob 
ably  that  they  have  not  allowed  enough  for  the 
difference  of  the  instrument,  have  persisted  in  the 
effort  to  render  impressions  that  the  plastic  artist 
renders  better,  neglecting  too  much  those  he  is 
unable  to  render.  From  time  to  time  they  have  put 
forth  a  volume  which  is  really  an  instructive  instance 
of  misapplied  ingenuity.  In  "  Madame  Gervaisais," 
for  example,  a  picture  of  the  visible,  sketchable 


JOURNAL    OF    THE    BROTHERS    DE    GONCOURT     197 

Rome  of  twenty-five  years  ago,  we  seem  to  hear  the 
voice  forced  to  sing  in  a  register  to  which  it  doesn't 
belong,  or  rather  (the  comparison  is  more  complete) 
to  attempt  effects  of  sound  that  are  essentially  not 
vocal.  The  novelist  competes  with  the  painter  and 
the  painter  with  the  novelist,  in  the  treatment  of  the 
aspect  and  figure  of  things;  but  what  a  happy  tact 
each  of  them  needs  to  keep  his  course  straight,  with 
out  poaching  on  the  other's  preserves !  In  Eng 
land  it  is  the  painter  who  is  apt  to  poach  most, 
and  in  France  the  writer.  However  this  may  be, 
no  one  probably  has  poached  more  than  have  MM. 
de  Goncourt. 

Whether  it  be  because  there  is  something  that 
touches  us  in  pious  persistence  in  error,  or  because 
even  when  it  prevails  there  may  on  the  part  of  a 
genuine  talent  be  the  happiest  hits  by  the  way,  I 
will  not  pretend  to  declare  ;  certain  it  is  that  the 
manner  in  which  our  authors  abound  in  their  own 
sense  and  make  us  feel  that  they  would  not  for  the 
world  care  for  anything  but  what  exactly  they  do 
care  for,  raises  the  liveliest  presumption  in  their 
favor.  If  literature  is  kept  alive  by  a  passion  loyal 
even  to  narrowness,  MM.  de  Goncourt  have  ren 
dered  real  services.  They  may  look  for  it  on  the 
one  side  in  directions  too  few,  and  on  the  other  in 
regions  thankless  and  barren  ,  their  Journal,  at  all 
events,  is  a  signal  proof  of  their  good  faith.  Won 
derful  are  such  courage  and  patience  and  industry; 
fatigued,  displeased,  disappointed,  they  never  inter 
mit  their  chronicle  nor  falter  in  their  task.  We  owe 


198  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON    AND    ELSEWHERE 

to  this  remarkable  feat  the  vivid  reflection  of  their 
life  for  twenty  years,  from  the  coup  d'etat  which  pro 
duced  the  Second  Empire  to  the  death  of  the  younger 
brother  on  the  eve  of  the  war  with  Germany ;  the 
history  of  their  numerous  books,  their  articles,  their 
studies,  studies  on  the  social  and  artistic  history  of 
France  during  the  latter  half  of  the  last  century — 
on  Mme.  de  Pompadour,  Mme.  du  Barry,  and  the 
other  mistresses  of  Louis  XV.,  on  Marie  Antoinette, 
on  society  and  la  femme  during  the  Revolution  and 
the  Directory;  the  register,  moreover,  of  their  ad 
ventures  and  triumphs  as  collectors  (collectors  of  the 
furniture,  tapestries,  drawings  of  the  last  century), 
of  their  observations  of  every  kind  in  the  direction 
in  which  their  nature  and  their  milieu  prompt  them 
to  observe,  of  their  talks,  their  visits,  their  dinners, 
their  physical  and  intellectual  states,  their  projects 
and  visions,  their  ambitions  and  collapses,  and,  above 
all,  of  their  likes  and  dislikes.  Above  all  of  their 
dislikes,  perhaps  I  should  say,  for  in  this  sort  of 
testimony  the  Journal  is  exceedingly  rich.  The 
number  of  things  and  of  people  obnoxious  to  their 
taste  is  extremely  large,  especially  when  we  consider 
the  absence  of  variety,  as  the  English  reader  judges 
variety,  in  their  personal  experience.  What  strikes 
an  English  reader,  curious  about  a  society  in  which 
acuteness  has  a  high  development  and  thankful  for 
a  picture  of  it,  is  the  small  surface  over  which  the 
career  of  MM.  de  Goncourt  is  distributed.  It  seems 
all  to  take  place  in  a  little  ring,  a  coterie  of  a  dozen 
people.  Movement,  exercise,  travel,  other  countries, 


JOURNAL   OF   THE    BROTHERS    DE   GONCOURT     199 

play  no  part  in  it ;  the  same  persons,  the  same 
places,  names,  and  occasions  perpetually  recur  ; 
there  is  scarcely  any  change  of  scene  or  any  enlarge 
ment  of  horizon.  The  authors  rarely  go  into  the 
country,  and  when  they  do  they  hate  it,  for  they  find 
it  bete.  To  the  English  mind  that  item  probably  de 
scribes  them  better  than  anything  else.  We  end  with 
the  sensation  of  a  closed  room,  of  a  want  of  venti 
lation  ;  we  long  to  open  a  window  or  two  and  let  in 
the  air  of  the  world.  The  Journal  of  MM.  de  Gon- 
court  is  mainly  a  record  of  resentment  and  suffering, 
and  to  this  circumstance  they  attribute  many  causes; 
but  we  suspect  at  last  that  the  real  cause  is  for  them 
too  the  inconvenience  from  which  we  suffer  as  read 
ers — simply  the  want  of  space  and  air. 

Though  the  surface  of  the  life  represented  is,  as 
I  have  said,  small,  it  is  large  enough  to  contain  a 
great  deal  of  violent  reaction,  an  extraordinary  quan 
tity  of  animadversion,  indignation,  denunciation.  In 
deed,  as  I  have  intimated,  the  simplest  way  to  sketch 
the  relation  of  disagreement  of  our  accomplished 
diarists  would  be  to  mention  the  handful  of  persons 
and  things  excepted  from  it.  They  are  "  down  " 
absolutely  on  Sainte-Beuve  and  strongly  on  MM. 
Taine  and  Scherer.  But  I  am  taking  the  wrong 
course.  The  great  exceptions  then,  in  addition  to 
the  half-dozen  friends  I  have  mentioned  (the  Prin 
cess,  Gavarni,  Theophile  Gautier,  Flaubert,  and  Paul 
de  Saint-Victor,  though  the  two  last  named  with  re 
strictions  which  finally  become  in  the  one  case  con 
siderable  and  in  the  other  very  marked),  are  the 


200  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

artistic  production  of  the  reign  of  Louis  XV.  and 
some  of  the  literary,  notably  that  of  Diderot,  which 
they  oppose  with  a  good  -deal  of  acrimony  to  that 
of  Voltaire.  They  have  also  no  quarrel  with  the 
wonderful  figure  of  Marie  Antoinette,  unique  in  its 
evocation  of  luxury  and  misery,  as  is  proved  by  the 
elaborate  monograph  which  they  published  in  1858. 
This  list  may  appear  meagre,  but  I  think  it  really 
exhausts  their  positive  sympathies,  so  far  as  the 
Journal  enlightens  us.  That  is  precisely  the  inter 
esting  point  and  the  fact  that  arrests  us,  that  the 
Journal,  copious  as  a  memorandum  of  the  artistic 
life,  is  in  so  abnormally  small  a  degree  a  picture  of 
enjoyment.  Such  a  fact  suggests  all  sorts  of  reflec 
tions,  and  in  particular  an  almost  anxious  one  as  to 
whether  the  passionate  artistic  life  necessarily  ex 
cludes  enjoyment.  I  say  the  passionate  because  this 
makes  the  example  better ;  it  is  only  passion  that 
gives  us  revelations  and  notes.  If  the  artist  is  nec 
essarily  sensitive,  does  that  sensitiveness  form  in  its 
essence  a  state  constantly  liable  to  shade  off  into 
the  morbid  ?  Does  this  liability,  moreover,  increase 
in  proportion  as  the  effort  is  great  and  the  ambition 
intense  ?  MM.  de  Goncourt  have  this  ground  for 
expecting  us  to  cite  their  experience  in  the  affir 
mative,  that  it  is  an  experience  abounding  in  rev 
elations.  I  don't  mean  to  say  that  they  are  all, 
but  only  that  they  are  preponderantly,  revelations  of 
suffering.  In  the  month  of  March,  1859,  in  allusion 
to  their  occupations  and  projects,  they  make  the  ex 
cellent  remark,  the  fruit  of  acquired  wisdom,  that 


JOURNAL  OF  THE  BROTHERS  DE  GONCOURT  2OI 

"  In  this  world  one  must  do  a  great  deal,  one  must 
intend  a  great  deal."  That  is  refreshing,  that  is  a 
breath  of  air.  But  as  a  general  thing  what  they  com 
memorate  as  workers  is  the  simple  break-down  of  joy. 
"  Tell  us,"  they  would  probably  say,  "  where  you 
will  find  an  analysis  equally  close  of  the  cheerfulness 
of  creation,  and  then  we  will  admit  that  our  testi 
mony  is  superficial.  Many  a  record  of  a  happy  per 
sonal  life,  yes ;  but  that  is  not  to  the  point.  The 
question  is  how  many  windows  are  opened,  how 
many  little  holes  are  pierced,  into  the  consciousness 
of  the  artist.  Our  contention  would  be  that  we 
have  pierced  more  little  holes  than  any  other  gimlet 
has  achieved.  Doubtless  there  are  many  people  who 
are  not  curious  about  the  consciousness  of  the  artist 
and  who  would  look  into  our  little  holes  —  if  the 
sense  of  a  kind  of  indelicacy,  even  of  indecency  in 
the  proceeding  were  not  too  much  for  them — mainly 
with  some  ulterior  view  of  making  fun  of  them.  Of 
course  the  better  economy  for  su'ch  people  is  to  let 
us  alone.  But  if  you  are  curious  (there  are  a  few 
who  happen  to  be),  where  will  you  get  to  the  same 
degree  as  in  these  patient  pages  the  particular  sen 
sation  of  having  your  curiosity  stimulated  and  fed  ? 
Will  you  get  it  in  the  long  biography  of  Scott,  in 
that  of  Dickens,  in  the  autobiography  of  Trollope, 
in  the  letters  of  Thackeray  ?  An  intimation  has 
reached  us  that  in  reading  the  letters  of  Thackeray 
you  are  moved,  on  the  contrary,  to  wonder  by  what 
trick  certain  natural  little  betrayals  of  the  conscious 
ness  of  the  artist  have  been  conjured  away.  Very 


202  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

likely  (we  see  you  mean  it)  such  betrayals  are  '  nat 
ural'  only  when  people  have  a  sense  of  responsi 
bility.  This  sense  may  very  well  be  a  fault,  but  it 
is  a  fault  to  which  the  world  owes  some  valuable 
information.  Ah  !  of  course  if  you  don't  think  our 
information  valuable,  there  is  no  use  talking."  The 
most  convenient  answer  to  this  little  address  would 
probably  be  the  remark  that  valuable  information 
is  supplied  by  the  artist  in  more  ways  than  one,  and 
that  we  must  look  for  it  in  his  finished  pieces  as 
well  as  in  his  note-books.  If  we  should  see  a  flaw 
in  this  supposititious  plea  of  our  contentious  friends 
it  would  be  after  turning  back  to  "  Germinie  Lacer- 
teux"  and  "Manette  Salomon."  Distinguished  and 
suggestive  as  these  performances  are,  they  do  not 
illustrate  the  artistic  view  so  very  much  more  than 
the  works  of  those  writers  whose  neglect  of  the 
practice  of  keeping  a  diary  of  protest  lays  them 
open  to  the  imputation  of  levity. 

In  reading  the  three  volumes  pencil  in  hand,  I 
have  marked  page  after  page  as  strongly  character 
istic,  but  I  find  in  turning  them  over  that  it  would 
be  difficult  to  quote  from  them  without  some  prin 
ciple  of  selection.  The  striking  passages  or  pages 
range  themselves  under  three  or  four  heads — the 
observation  of  persons,  the  observation  of  places 
and  things  (works  of  art,  largely),  the  report  of  con 
versations,  and  the  general  chapter  of  the  subjec 
tive,  which,  as  I  have  hinted,  is  the  general  chapter 
of  the  saignant.  "  During  dinner,"  I  read  in  the 
second  volume,  '•'•nous  avons  Fagacement  of  hearing 


JOURNAL  OF  THE  BROTHERS  DE  GONCOURT  203 

Sainte-Beuve,  the  fine  talker,  the  fine  connoisseur 
in  letters,  talk  art  in  a  muddled  manner,  praise  Eu 
gene  Delacroix  as  a  philosophical  painter,"  etc. 
These  words,  nous  (irons  Fagafement,  might  stand  as 
the  epigraph  of  the  Journal  at  large,  so  exact  a 
translation  would  they  be  of  the  emotion  apparently 
most  frequent  with  the  authors.  On  every  possible 
and  impossible  occasion  they  have  the  annoyance.  I 
hasten  to  add  that  I  can  easily  imagine  it  to  have 
been  an  annoyance  to  hear  the  historian  of  Port 
Royal  talk,  and  talk  badly,  about  Eugene  Delacroix. 
But  on  whatever  subject  he  expressed  himself  he 
seems  to  have  been  to  the  historians  of  Manette 
Salomon  even  as  a  red  rag  to  a  bull.  The  aversion 
they  entertained  for  him,  a  plant  watered  by  fre 
quent  intercourse  and  protected  by  punctual  notes, 
has  brought  them  good  luck ,  in  this  sense,  I  mean, 
that  they  have  made  a  more  living  figure  of  him  than 
of  any  name  in  their  work.  The  taste  of  the  whole 
evocation  is,  to  my  mind  and  speaking  crudely,  atro 
cious  ;  there  is  only  one  other  case  (the  portrait  of 
Madame  de  Pai'va)  in  which  it  is  more  difficult  to 
imagine  the  justification  of  so  great  a  license.  Noth 
ing  of  all  this  is  quotable  by  a  cordial  admirer  of 
Sainte-Beuve,  who,  however,  would  resent  the  treach 
ery  of  it  even  more  than  he  does  if  he  were  not  care 
ful  to  remember  that  the  scandalized  reader  has 
always  the  resource  of  opening  the  "  Causeries  du 
Lundi."  MM.  de  Goncourt  write  too  much  as  if  they 
had  forgotten  that.  The  thirty  volumes  of  that  won 
derful  work  contain  a  sufficiently  substantial  answer 


204  ESSAYS   IN    LONDON    AND    ELSEWHERE 

to  their  account  of  the  figure  he  cut  when  they  dined 
with  him  as  his  invited  guests  or  as  fellow-members 
of  a  brilliant  club.  Impression  for  impression,  we 
have  that  of  the  Causeries  to  set  against  that  of  the 
Journal,  and  it  takes  the  larger  hold  of  us.  The 
reason  is  that  it  belongs  to  the  finer  part  of  Sainte- 
Beuve  •,  whereas  the  picture  from  the  Goncourt  gal 
lery  (representing  him,  for  instance,  as  a  petit  merrier 
de  province  en  partie  fine)  deals  only  with  his  personal 
features.  These  are  important,  and  they  were  unfor 
tunately  anything  but  superior  ;  but  they  were  not 
so  important  as  MM.  de  Goncourt's  love  of  art,  for 
art  makes  them,  nor  so  odious  surely  when  they 
were  seen  in  conjunction  with  the  nature  of  his  ex 
traordinary  mind.  Upon  the  nature  of  his  extraor 
dinary  mind  our  authors  throw  no  more  light  than 
his  washerwoman  or  his  shoemaker  might  have  done. 
They  may  very  well  have  said,  of  course,  that  this 
was  not  their  business,  and  that  the  fault  was  the 
eminent  critic's  if  his  small  and  ugly  sides  were 
what  showed  most  in  his  conversation.  Their  busi 
ness,  they  may  contend,  was  simply  to  report  that 
conversation  and  its  accompaniment  of  little,  com 
promising  personal  facts  as  minutely  and  vividly  as 
possible ;  to  attempt  to  reproduce  for  others  the 
image  that  moved  before  them  with  such  infirmities 
and  limitations.  Why  for  others  ?  the  reader  of  these 
volumes  may  well  ask  himself  in  this  connection  as 
well  as  in  many  another ;  so  clear  does  it  appear  to 
him  that  he  must  have  been  out  of  the  question  of 
Sainte-Beuve's  private  relations — just  as  he  feels  that 


JOURNAL  OF  THE  BROTHERS  DE  GONCOURT  205 

he  was  never  included  in  that  of  Madame  de  Pa'iva's 
or  the  Princess  Mathilde's.  We  are  confronted  afresh 
with  the  whole  subject  of  critical  discretion,  the  re 
sponsibility  of  exposure,  and  the  strange  literary  man 
ners  of  our  clay.  The  Journal  of  MM.  de  Goncourt 
will  have  rendered  at  least  the  service  of  fortifying 
the  blessed  cause  of  occasional  silence.  If  their  am 
bition  was  to  make  Sainte-Beuve  odious,  it  has  suf 
fered  the  injury  that  we  are  really  more  disagreeably 
affected  by  the  character  of  the  attack.  That  is  more 
odious  even  than  the  want  of  private  dignity  of  a 
demoralized  investigator.  And  in  this  case  the  ques 
tion  the  reader  further  asks  is,  Why  even  for  them 
selves  ?  and  what  superior  interest  was  served  by  the 
elaboration  week  by  week  of  this  minute  record  of 
an  implacable  animosity  ?  Keeping  so  patiently-writ 
ten,  so  crossed  and  dotted  and  dated  a  register  of 
hatred  is  a  practice  that  gives  the  queerest  account 
of  your  own  nature,  and  indeed  there  are  strange 
lights  thrown  throughout  these  pages  on  that  of  MM. 
de  Goncourt.  There  is  a  kind  of  ferocity  in  the  way 
the  reporter  that  abides  in  them  (how  could  they 
have  abstained  from  kicking  him  out  of  doors  with 
a  "  You're  very  clever,  but  you're  really  a  bird  of 
night"?)  pursues  the  decomposing  causeur  to  the 
end,  seeking  effects  of  grotesqueness  in  the  aspects 
of  his  person  and  the  misery  of  his  disease. 

All  this  is  most  unholy,  especially  on  the  part  of 
a  pair  of  delicats.  MM.  de  Goncourt,  I  know,  pro 
fess  a  perfect  readiness  to  relinquish  this  title  in  cer 
tain  conditions ;  they  consider  that  there  is  a  large 


206  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON    AND    ELSEWHERE 

delicacy  and  a  small  one,  and  they  remind  us  of  the 
fact  that  they  could  never  have  written  "  Germinie 
Lacerteux"  if  they  had  been  afraid  of  being  called 
coarse.  In  fact  they  imply,  I  think,  that  for  people 
of  masculine  observation  the  term  has  no  relevancy 
at  all ;  it  is  simply  non-observant  in  its  associations 
and  exists  for  the  convenience  of  the  ladies — a  re 
spectable  function,  but  one  of  which  the  importance 
should  not  be  overrated.  This  idea  is  luminous, 
but  it  will  probably  never  go  far  without  plumping 
against  another,  namely,  that  there  is  a  reality  in  the 
danger  of  feeling  coarsely,  that  the  epithet  represents 
also  a  state  of  perception.  Does  it  come  about,  the 
danger  in  question,  in  consequence  of  too  prolonged 
a  study,  however  disinterested,  of  the  uglinesses  and 
uncleannesses  of  life  ?  It  may  occur  in  that  fashion 
and  it  may  occur  in  others;  the  point  is  that  we 
recognize  its  ravages  when  we  encounter  them,  and 
that  they  are  a  much  more  serious  matter  than  the 
accident — the  source  of  some  silly  reproach  to  our 
authors — of  having  narrated  the  history  of  an  hys 
terical  servant -girl.  That  is  a  detail  ("Germinie 
Lacerteux"  is  a  very  brilliant  experiment),  whereas 
the  catastrophe  I  speak  of  is  of  the  very  essence. 
We  know  it  has  taken  place  when  we  begin  to  notice 
that  the  artist's  instrument  has  parted  with  the  qual 
ity  which  is  supposed  to  make  it  most  precious — 
the  fineness  to  which  it  owed  its  sureness,  its  exemp 
tion  from  mistakes.  The  spectator's  disappointment 
is  great,  of  course,  in  proportion  as  his  confidence 
was  high.  The  fine  temper  of  MM.  de  Goncourt 


JOURNAL  OF  THE  BROTHERS  DE  GONCOURT  207 

had  inspired  us  with  the  highest ;  their  whole  atti 
tude  had  been  a  protest  against  vulgarity.  Mere 
prettiness  of  subject — we  were  aware  of  the  very 
relative  place  they  give  to  that ;  but,  on  the  other 
hand,  had  they  not  mastered  the  whole  gamut  of  the 
shades  of  the  aristocratic  sense  ?  Was  not  a  part 
of  the  charm  of  execution  of  "  Germinie  Lacerteux  " 
the  glimpse  of  the  taper  fingers  that  wielded  the 
brush  ?  It  was  not  perhaps  the  brush  of  Vandyck, 
but  might  Vandyck  not  have  painted  the  white  hand 
that  held  it  ?  It  is  no  white  hand  that  holds,  alas, 
this  uncontrollably  querulous  and  systematically 
treacherous  pen.  "Memoires  de  la  Vie  Litteraire" 
is  the  sub-title  of  their  Journal ;  but  what  sort  of  a 
life  will  posterity  credit  us  with  having  led  and  for 
what  sort  of  chroniclers  will  they  take  the  two  gen 
tlemen  who  were  assiduous  attendants  at  the  Diner 
Magny  only  to  the  end  that  they  might  smuggle  in, 
as  it  were,  the  uninvited  (that  is,  you  and  me  who 
read),  and  entertain  them  at  the  expense  of  their  col 
leagues  and  comrades  ?  The  Diner  Magny  was  a  club, 
the  club  is  a  high  expression  of  the  civilization  of 
our  time  ;  but  the  way  in  which  MM.  de  Goncourt 
interpret  the  institution  makes  them  singular  partici 
pants  of  that  civilization.  It  is  a  strange  perform 
ance,  when  one  thinks  of  the  performers — celebrated 
representatives  of  the  refinement  of  their  age.  "  If 
this  was  the  best  society,"  our  grandchildren  may 
say,  "  what  could  have  been  the  precedes  in  that 
which  was  not  so  good?" 

It  is  the  firm   conviction   of  many   persons  that 


208  ESSAYS   IN   LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

literature  is  not  doing  well,  that  it  is  even  distinctly 
on  the  wane,  and  that  before  many  years  it  will  have 
ceased  to  exist  in  any  agreeable  form,  so  that  those 
living  at  that  period  will  have  to  look  far  back  for 
any  happy  example  of  it.  May  it  not  occur  to  us 
that  if  they  look  back  to  the  phase  lately  embodied 
by  MM.  de  Goncourt  it  will  perhaps  strike  them 
that  their  loss  is  not  cruel,  since  the  vanished  boon 
was,  after  all,  so  far  from  guaranteeing  the  ameni 
ties  of  things  ?  May  the  moral  not  appear  pointed 
by  the  authors  of  the  Journal  rather  than  by  the 
confreres  they  have  sacrificed  ?  We  of  the  English 
tongue  move  here  already  now  in  a  region  of  uncer 
tain  light,  where  our  proper  traditions  and  canons 
cease  to  guide  our  steps.  The  portions  of  the  work 
before  us  that  refer  to  Madame  de  Paiva,  to  the 
Princess  Mathilde  Bonaparte,  leave  us  absolutely 
without  a  principle  of  appreciation.  If  it  be  correct 
according  to  the  society  in  which  they  live,  we  have 
only  to  learn  the  lesson  that  we  have  no  equivalent 
for  some  of  the  ideas  and  standards  of  that  society. 
We  read  on  one  page  that  our  authors  were  personal 
friends  of  Madame  de  Pa'iva,  her  guests,  her  inter 
locutors,  recipients  of  her  confidence,  partakers  of 
her  hospitality,  spectators  of  her  splendor.  On  the 
next  we  see  her  treated  like  the  last  of  the  last,  with 
not  only  her  character  but  her  person  held  up  to  our 
irreverent  inspection,  and  the  declaration  that  "  elle 
s'est  toute  crachee,"  in  a  phrase  which  showed  one 
day  that  she  was  purse-proud.  Is  it  because  the  lady 
owed  her  great  wealth  to  the  favors  of  which  she  had 


JOURNAL   OF   THE    BROTHERS   DE   GONCOURT      209 

been  lavish  that  MM.  de  Goncourt  hold  themselves 
free  to  turn  her  friendship  to  this  sort  of  profit  ? 
If  Madame  de  Pai'va  was  good  enough  to  dine, 
or  anything  else,  with,  she  was  good  enough  either 
to  speak  of  without  brutality  or  to  speak  of  not  at 
all.  Does  not  this  misdemeanor  of  MM.  de  Gon 
court  perhaps  represent,  where  women  are  concerned, 
a  national  as  well  as  a  personal  tendency — a  ten 
dency  which  introduces  the  strangest  of  complica 
tions  into  the  French  theory  of  gallantry  ?  Our 
Anglo-Saxon  theory  has  only  one  face,  while  the 
French  appears  to  have  two ;  with  "  Make  love  to 
her,"  as  it  were,  on  one  side,  and  "  Tue-la "  on  the 
other.  The  French  theory,  in  a  word,  involves  a 
great  deal  of  killing,  and  the  ladies  who  are  the 
subject  of  it  must  often  ask  themselves  whether  they 
do  not  pay  dearly  for  this  advantage  of  being  made 
love  to.  By  "  killing "  I  allude  to  the  exploits  of 
the  pen  as  well  as  to  those  of  the  directer  weapons 
so  ardently  advocated  by  M.  Dumas  the  younger. 
On  what  theory  has  M.  Edmond  de  Goncourt  handed 
over  to  publicity  the  whole  record  of  his  relations 
with  the  Princess  Mathilde  ?  He  stays  in  her  house 
for  clays,  for  weeks  together,  and  then  portrays  for 
our  entertainment  her  person,  her  clothes,  her  gest 
ures,  and  her  salon,  repeating  her  words,  reproducing 
her  language,  relating  anecdotes  at  her  expense,  de 
scribing  the  freedom  of  speech  used  towards  her  by 
her  convives,  the  racy  expressions  that  passed  her 
own  lips.  In  one  place  he  narrates  (or  is  it  his 
brother  ?)  how  the  Princess  was  unable  to  resist  the 
14 


210  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

impulse  to  place  a  kiss  upon  his  brow.  The  liberty 
taken  is  immense,  and  the  idea  of  gallantry  here  has 
undergone  a  transmutation  which  lifts  it  quite  out  of 
measurement  by  any  scale  or  scruple  of  ours.  I 
repeat  that  the  plea  is  surely  idle  that  the  brothers 
are  accomplished  reporters  to  whom  an  enterprising 
newspaper  would  have  found  it  worth  while  to  pay 
a  high  salary;  for  that  cleverness,  that  intelligence, 
are  simply  the  very  standard  by  which  we  judge 
them.  The  betrayal  of  the  Princess  is  altogether 
beyond  us. 

Would  Theophile  Gautier  feel  that  he  is  betrayed  ? 
Probably  not,  for  Theophile  Gautier's  feelings,  as 
represented  by  MM.  de  Goncourt,  were  nothing  if 
not  eccentric,  his  judgment  nothing  if  not  perverse. 
His  two  friends  say  somewhere  that  the  sign  of  his 
conversation  was  Vknormit'e  dans  h  paradoxe.  He 
certainly  then  would  have  risen  to  the  occasion  if  it 
were  a  question  of  maintaining  that  his  friends  had 
rendered  a  service  to  his  reputation.  This  to  my 
mind  is  contestable,  though  their  intention  (at  least 
in  publishing  their  notes  on  him)  was  evidently  to 
do  so,  for  the  greater  part  of  his  talk,  as  they  repeat 
it,  owes  most  of  its  relief  to  its  obscenity.  That  is 
not  fair  to  a  man  really  clever — they  should  have 
given  some  other  examples.  But  what  strongly 
strikes  us,  however  the  service  to  Gautier  may  be 
estimated,  is  that  they  have  rendered  a  questionable 
service  to  themselves.  He  is  the  finest  mind  in  their 
pages,  he  is  ever  the  object  of  their  sympathy  and 
applause.  That  is  very  graceful,  but  it  enlightens 


JOURNAL   OF   THE    BROTHERS    DE   GONCOURT      211 

us  as  to  their  intellectual  perspective,  and  I  say  this 
with  a  full  recollection  of  all  that  can  be  urged  on 
Gautier's  behalf.  He  was  a  charming  genius,  he  was 
an  admirable,  a  delightful  writer.  His  vision  was  all 
his  own  and  his  brush  was  worthy  of  his  vision.  He 
knew  the  French  color-box  as  well  as  if  he  had 
ground  the  pigments,  and  it  may  really  be  said  of 
him  that  he  did  grind  a  great  many  of  them.  And 
yet  with  all  this  he  is  not  one  of  the  first,  for  his 
poverty  of  .ideas  was  great.  Le  sultan  de  Vepithete 
our  authors  call  him,  but  he  was  not  the  emperor  of 
thought.  To  be  light  is  not  necessarily  a  damning 
limitation.  Who  was  lighter  than  Charles  Lamb,  for 
instance,  and  yet  who  was  wiser  for  our  immediate 
needs  ?  Gautier's  defect  is  that  he  had  veritably 
but  one  idea :  he  never  got  beyond  the  superstition 
that  real  literary  greatness  is  to  bewilder  the  bour 
geois.  Flaubert  sat,  intellectually,  in  the  same  ever 
lasting  twilight,  and  the  misfortune  is  even  greater 
for  him,  for  his  was  the  greater  spirit.  Gautier  had 
other  misfortunes  as  well — the  struggle  that  never 
came  to  success,  the  want  of  margin,  of  time  to  do 
the  best  work,  the  conflict,  in  a  hand-to-mouth,  hack 
neyed  literary  career,  between  splendid  images  and 
peculiarly  sordid  realities.  Moreover,  his  paradoxes 
were  usually  g'enial  and  his  pessimism  was  amiable 
—  in  the  poetic  glow  of  many  of  his  verses  and 
sketches  you  can  scarcely  tell  it  from  optimism.  All 
this  makes  us  tender  to  his  memory,  but  it  does  not 
blind  us  to  the  fact  that  MM.  de  Goncourt  classify 
themselves  when  they  show  us  that  in  the  literary 


212  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

circle  of  their  time  they  find  him  the  most  typical 
figure.  He  has  the  supreme  importance,  he  looms 
largest  and  covers  most  ground.  This  leaves  Gautier 
very  much  where  he  was,  but  it  tickets  his  fastidious 
friends. 

"  Theophile  Gautier,  who  is  here  for  some  days, 
talks  opera-dancers,"  they  note  in  the  summer  of 
1868.  "  He  describes  the  white  satin  shoe  which, 
for  each  of  them,  is  strengthened  by  a  little  cushion 
of  silk  in  the  places  where  the  dancer  feels  that  she 
bears  and  presses  most ;  a  cushion  which  would  in 
dicate  to  an  expert  the  name  of  the  dancer.  And 
observe  that  this  work  is  always  done  by  the  dancer 
herself."  I  scarcely  know  why,  but  there  is  some 
thing  singularly  characteristic  in  this  last  injunction 
of  MM.  de  Goncourt,  or  of  MM.  de  Goncourt  and 
Theophile  Gautier  combined  :  "  Et  remarquez  — !" 
The  circumstance  that  a  ballet-girl  cobbles  her  shoes 
in  a  certain  way  has  indeed  an  extreme  significance. 
"  Gautier  begins  to  rejudge  The  Misanthrope,  a 
comedy  for  a  Jesuit  college  on  the  return  from  the 
holidays.  Ah  !  the  pig — what  a  language !  it  is  ill- 
written  !"  And  Gautier  adds  that  he  can't  say  this 
in  print ;  people  would  abuse  him  and  it  would  take 
the  bread  out  of  his  mouth.  And  then  he  falls  foul 
of  Louis  XIV.  "  A  hog,  pockmarked  like  a  colander, 
and  short !  He  was  not  five  feet  high,  the  great 
king.  Always  eating  and  — "  My  quotation  is 
nipped  in  the  bud :  an  attempt  to  reproduce  Gau- 
tier's  conversation  in  English  encounters  obstacles 
on  the  threshold.  In  this  case  we  must  burn  pas- 


JOURNAL  OF  THE  BROTHERS  DE  GONCOURT   213 

tilles  even  to  read  the  rest  of  the  sketch,  and  we 
cannot  translate  it  at  all.  "  Lcs  bourgeois  —  why, 
the  most  enormous  things  go  on  chez  ks  bourgeois" 
he  remarks  on  another  occasion.  "  I  have  had  a 
glimpse  of  a  few  interiors.  It  is  the  sort  of  thing  to 
make  you  veil  your  face."  But  again  I  must  stop. 
M.  Taine  on  this  occasion  courageously  undertakes 
the  defence  of  the  bourgeois,  of  their  decency,  but 
M.  Paul  de  Saint -Victor  comes  to  Gander's  sup 
port  with  an  allusion  impossible  even  to  paraphrase, 
which  apparently  leaves  those  gentlemen  in  posses 
sion  of  the  field.  The  effort  of  our  time  has  been, 
as  we  know,  to  disinter  the  details  of  history,  to  see 
the  celebrities  of  the  past,  and  even  the  obscure  per 
sons,  in  the  small  facts  as  well  as  in  the  big  facts  of 
their  lives.  In  his  realistic  evocation  of  Louis  XIV. 
Gautier  was  in  agreement  with  this  fashion;  the  his 
toric  imagination  operated  in  him  by  the  light  of  the 
rest  of  his  mind.  But  it  is  through  the  nose  even 
more  than  through  the  eyes  that  it  appears  to  have 
operated,  and  these  flowers  of  his  conversation  sug 
gest  that,  though  he  was  certainly  an  animated  talker, 
our  wonder  at  such  an  anomaly  as  that  MM.  de  Gon- 
court  should  apparently  have  sacrificed  almost  every 
one  else  to  their  estimate  of  him  is  not  without  its 
reasons. 

There  are  lights  upon  Flaubert's  conversation 
which  are  somewhat  of  the  same  character  (though 
not  in  every  case)  as  those  projected  upon  Gautier's. 
Gautier  himself  furnishes  one  of  the  most  interesting 
of  them  when  he  mentions  that  the  author  of  "  Ma- 


214  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

dame  Bovary  "  had  said  to  him  of  a  new  book,  "  It 
is  finished ;  I  have  a  dozen  more  pages  to  write,  but 
I  have  the  fall  of  every  phrase."  Flaubert  had  the 
religion  of  rhythm,  and  when  he  had  caught  the 
final  cadence  of  each  sentence  —  something  that 
might  correspond,  in  prose,  to  the  rhyme  —  he  filled 
in  the  beginning  and  middle.  But  Gautier  makes 
the  distinction  that  his  rhythms  were  addressed 
above  all  to  the  ear  (they  were  "mouthers,"  as  the 
author  of  "  Le  Capitaine  Fracasse  "  happily  says) ; 
whereas  those  that  he  himself  sought  were  ocular, 
not  intended  to  be  read  aloud.  There  was  no  style 
worth  speaking  of  for  Flaubert  but  the  style  that 
required  reading  aloud  to  give  out  its  value ;  he 
mouthed  his  passages  to  himself.  This  was  not  in 
the  least  the  sort  of  prose  that  MM.  de  Goncourt 
themselves  cultivated.  The  reader  of  their  novels 
will  perceive  that  harmonies  and  cadences  are  noth 
ing  to  them,  and  that  their  rhythms  are,  with  a  few 
rare  exceptions,  neither  to  be  sounded  nor  to  be 
seen.  A  page  of  "  Madame  Gervaisais,"  for  instance, 
is  an  almost  impossible  thing  to  read  aloud.  Per 
haps  this  is  why  poor  Flaubert  ended  by  giving  on 
their  nerves  when  on  a  certain  occasion  he  invited 
them  to  come  and  listen  to  a  manuscript.  They 
could  endure  the  structure  of  his  phrase  no  longer, 
and  they  alleviate  themselves  in  their  diary.  It  ac 
counts  for  the  great  difference  between  their  treat 
ment  of  him  and  their  treatment  of  Gautier :  they  ac 
cept  the  latter  to  the  end,  while  with  the  author  of 
"  Salammbo  "  at  a  given  moment  they  break  down. 


JOURNAL    OF    THE    BROTHERS    DE    GONCOURT       215 

It  may  appear  that  we  have  sacrificed  MM.  de 
Goncourt's  Journal,  in  contradiction  to  the  spirit  pro 
fessed  at  the  beginning  of  these  remarks  ;  so  that  we 
must  not  neglect  to  give  back  with  the  other  hand 
something  presentable  as  the  equivalent  of  what  we 
have  taken  away.  The  truth  is  our  authors  are,  in  a 
very  particular  degree,  specialists,  and  the  element  of 
which,  as  they  would  say,  nous  avons  Fagaccment  in 
this  autobiographic  publication  is  largely  the  result 
of  a  disastrous  attempt,  undertaken  under  the  cir 
cumstances  with  a  strangely  good  conscience,  to  be 
more  general  than  nature  intended  them.  Consti 
tuted  in  a  remarkable  manner  for  receiving  impres 
sions  of  the  external,  and  resolving  them  into  pictures 
in  which  each  touch  looks  fidgety,  but  produces  none 
the  less  its  effect — for  conveying  the  suggestion  (in 
many  cases,  perhaps  in  most,  the  derisive  or  the  in 
vidious  suggestion)  of  scenes,  places,  faces,  figures, 
objects,  they  have  not  been  able  to  deny  themselves 
in  the  page  directly  before  us  the  indulgence  of  a 
certain  yearning  for  the  abstract,  for  conceptions  and 
ideas.  In  this  direction  they  are  not  happy,  not  gen 
eral  and  serene ;  they  have  a  way  of  making  large 
questions  small,  of  thrusting  in  their  petulance,  of 
belittling  even  the  religion  of  literature.  Jc  vomis 
mes  contemporains,  one  of  them  somewhere  says,  and 
there  is  always  danger  for  them  that  an  impression 
will  act  as  an  emetic.  But  when  we  meet  them  on 
their  own  ground,  that  of  the  perception  of  feature 
and  expression,  that  of  translation  of  the  printed  and 
published  text  of  life,  they  are  altogether  admirable. 


2l6  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND   ELSEWHERE 

It  is  mainly  on  this  ground  that  we  meet  them  in  their 
novels,  and  the  best  pages  of  the  Journal  are  those 
in  which  they  return  to  it.  There  are,  in  fact,  very 
few  of  these  that  do  not  contain  some  striking  illus 
tration  of  the  way  in  which  every  combination  of  ob 
jects  about  them  makes  a  picture  for  them,  and  a  pict 
ure  that  testifies  vividly  to  the  life  led  in  the  midst  of 
it.  In  the  year  1853  they  were  legally  prosecuted  as 
authors  of  a  so-called  indecent  article  in  a  foolish  lit 
tle  newspaper-,  the  prosecution  was  puerile,. and  their 
acquittal  was  a  matter  of  course.  But  they  had  to  se 
lect  a  defender,  and  they  called  upon  a  barrister  who 
had  been  recommended  to  them  as  "  safe."  "  In  his 
drawing-room  he  had  a  flower-stand  of  which  the  foot 
consisted  of  a  serpent  in  varnished  wood  climbing  in 
a  spiral  up  to  a  bird's  nest.  When  I  saw  this  flower- 
stand  I  felt  a  chill  in  my  back.  I  guessed  the  sort  of 
advocate  that  was  to  be  our  lot."  The  object,  rare  or 
common,  has  on  every  occasion  the  highest  importance 
for  them ;  when  it  is  rare  it  gives  them  their  deepest 
pleasure,  but  when  it  is  common  it  represents  and 
signifies,  and  it  is  ever  the  thing  that  signifies  most. 
Theophile  Gautier's  phrase  about  his  own  talent 
has  attained  a  certain  celebrity  ("  Critics  have  been 
so  good  as  to  reason  about  me  overmuch — I  am  sim 
ply  a  man  for  whom  the  visible  world  exists"),  but 
MM.  de  Goncourt  would  have  had  every  bit  as  good 
a  right  to  utter  it.  People  for  whom  the  visible  world 
doesn't  "  exist "  are  people  with  whom  they  have  no 
manner  of  patience,  and  their  conception  of  litera 
ture  is  a  conception  of  something  in  which  such  peo- 


JOURNAL  OF  THE  BROTHERS  DE  GONCOURT   217 

pie  have  no  part.  Moreover,  oddly  enough,  even  as 
specialists  they  pay  for  their  intensity  by  stopping 
short  in  certain  directions  ;  the  country  is  a  consid 
erable  part  of  the  visible  world,  but  their  Journal 
is  full  of  little  expressions  of  annoyance  and  disgust 
with  it.  What  they  like  is  the  things  they  can  do 
something  with,  and  they  can  do  nothing  with  woods 
and  fields,  nothing  with  skies  that  are  not  the  ceiling 
of  crooked  streets  or  the  "  glimmering  square "  of 
windows.  However,  we  must,  of  course,  take  men 
for  what  they  have,  not  for  what  they  have  not,  and 
the  good  faith  of  the  two  brothers  is  immensely  fruit 
ful  when  they  project  it  upon  their  own  little  plot. 
What  an  amount  of  it  they  have  needed,  we  exclaim 
as  we  read,  to  sustain  them  in  such  an  attempt  as 
"  Madame  Gervaisais  " — an  attempt  to  trace  the  con 
version  of  a  spirit  from  scepticism  to  Catholicism 
through  contact  with  the  old  marbles  and  frescos,  the 
various  ecclesiastical  bric-a-brac  of  Rome.  Nothing 
could  show  less  the  expert,  the  habitual  explorer  of 
the  soul  than  the  purely  pictorial  plane  of  the  demon 
stration.  Of  the  attitude  of  the  soul  itself,  of  the 
combinations,  the  agitations,  of  which  it  was  trace- 
ably  the  scene,  there  are  no  picture  and  no  notation 
at  all.  When  the  great  spiritual  change  takes  place 
for  their  heroine,  the  way  in  which  it  seems  to  the 
authors  most  to  the  purpose  to  represent  it  is  by  a 
wonderful  description  of  the  confessional,  at  the  Gesu, 
to  which  she  goes  for  the  first  time  to  kneel.  A  deep 
Christian  mystery  has  been  wrought  within  her,  but 
the  account  of  it  in  the  novel  is  that 


2l8  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON    AND    ELSEWHERE 

"The  confessional  is  beneath  the  mosaic  of  the  choir,  held 
and  confined  between  the  two  supports  carried  by  the  heads  of 
angels,  with  the  shadow  of  the  choir  upon  its  brown  wood,  its 
little  columns,  its  escutcheoned  front,  the  hollow  of  its  black 
ness  detaching  itself  dark  from  the  yellow  marble  of  the  pilas 
ters,  from  the  white  marble  of  the  wainscot.  It  has  two  steps 
on  the  side  for  the  knees  of  the  penitent ;  at  the  height  for  lean 
ing  a  little  square  of  copper  trellis-work,  in  the  middle  of  which 
the  whisper  of  lips  and  the  breath  of  sins  has  made  a  soiled,  rusty 
circle  ;  and  above  this,  in  a  poor  black  frame,  a  meagre  print, 
under  which  is  stamped  Gesu  muore  in  croce,  and  the  glass  of 
which  receives  a  sort  of  gleam  of  blood  from  the  nickering  fire 
of  a  lamp  suspended  in  the  chapel  beside  it." 

The  weakness  of  such  an  effort  as  "  Madame  Ger- 
vaisais  "  is  that  it  has  so  much  less  authority  as  the 
history  of  a  life  than  as  the  exhibition  of  a  palette. 
On  the  other  hand,  it  expresses  some  of  the  aspects 
of  the  most  interesting  city  in  the  world  with  an  art  al 
together  peculiar,  an  art  which  is  too  much,  in  places, 
an  appeal  to  our  patience,  but  which  says  a  hundred 
things  to  us  about  the  Rome  of  our  senses  a  hundred 
times  better  than  we  could  have  said  them  for  our 
selves.  At  the  risk  of  seeming  to  attempt  to  make 
characterization  an  affair  of  as  many  combined  and 
repeated  touches  as  MM.  de  Goncourt  themselves, 
or  as  the  cumulative  Sainte-Beuve,  master  of  aggra 
vation,  I  must  add  that  their  success,  even  where  it 
is  great,  is  greatest  for  those  readers  who  are  sub 
missive  to  description  and  even  to  enumeration.  The 
process,  I  say,  is  an  appeal  to  our  patience,  and  I  have 
already  hinted  that  the  image,  the  evocation,  is  not  im 
mediate,  as  it  is,  for  instance,  with  Guy  de  Maupas- 


JOURNAL  OF  THE  BROTHERS  DE  GONCOURT   2 19 

sant :  our  painters  believe,  above  all,  in  shades,  deal 
essentially  with  shades,  have  a  horror  of  anything 
like  rough  delineation.  They  arrive  at  the -exact,  the 
particular;  but  it  is,  above  all,  on  a  second  reading 
that  we  see  them  arrive,  so  that  they  perhaps  suffer  a 
certain  injustice  from  those  who  are  unwilling  to  give 
more  than  a  first.  They  select,  but  they  see  so  much 
in  things  that  even  their  selection  contains  a  multi 
plicity  of  items.  The  Journal,  none  the  less,  is  full 
of  aspects  caught  in  the  fact.  In  1867  they  make  a 
stay  in  Auvergne,  and  their  notes  are  perhaps  pre 
cisely  the  more  illustrative  from  the  circumstance 
that  they  find  everything  odious. 

"Return  to  Clermont.  We  go  up  and  down  the  town. 
Scarcely  a  passer.  The  flat  Sabbatical  gloom  of  la  province,  to 
which  is  added  here  the  mourning  of  the  horrible  stone  of  the 
country,  the  slate-stone  of  the  Volvic,  which  resembles  the  stones 
of  dungeons  in  the  fifth  act  of  popular  melodramas.  Here  and 
there  a  campo  which  urges  suicide,  a  little  square  with  little  point 
ed  paving-stones  and  the  grass  of  the  court  of  a  seminary  growing 
between  them,  where  the  dogs  yawn  as  they  pass.  A  church,  the 
cathedral  of  colliers,  black  without,  black  within,  a  law-court,  a 
black  temple  of  justice,  an  Odeon-theatre  of  the  law,  academi 
cally  funereal,  from  which  one  drops  into  a  public  walk  where  the 
trees  are  so  bored  that  they  grow  thin  in  the  wide,  mouldy  shade. 
Always  and  everywhere  the  windows  and  doors  bordered  with 
black,  like  circulars  conveying  information  of  a  demise.  And 
sempiternally,  on  the  horizon,  that  eternal  Puy  de  Dome,  whose 
bluish  cone  reminds  one  so,  grocer -fashion,  of  a  sugar-loaf 
wrapped  in  its  paper." 

A  complete  account  of  MM.  de  Goncourt  would 
not  close  without  some  consideration  of  the  whole 


220  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

question  of,  I  will  not  say  the  legitimacy,  but  the  dis 
cretion,  of  the  attempt  on  the  part  of  an  artist  whose 
vehicle  is  only  collocations  of  words  to  be  nothing  if 
not  plastic,  to  do  the  same  things  and  achieve  the 
same  effects  as  the  painter.  Our  authors  offer  an 
excellent  text  for  a  discourse  on  that  theme,  but  I 
may  not  pronounce  it,  as  I  have  not  in  these  limits 
pretended  to  do  more  than  glance  in  the  direction  of 
that  activity  in  fiction  on  which  they  appear  mainly 
to  take  their  stand.  The  value  of  the  endeavor  I 
speak  of  will  be  differently  rated  according  as  peo 
ple  like  to  "  see  "  as  they  read,  and  according  as  in 
their  particular  case  MM.  de  Goncourt  will  appear 
to  have  justified  by  success  a  manner  of  which  it  is 
on  every  occasion  to  be  said  that  it  was  handicapped 
at  the  start.  My  own  idea  would  be  that  they  have 
given  this  manner  unmistakable  life.  They  have  had 
an  observation  of  their  own,  which  is  a  great  thing, 
and  it  has  made  them  use  language  in  a  light  of  their 
own.  They  have  attempted  an  almost  impossible  feat 
of  translation,  but  there  are  not  many  passages  they 
have  altogether  missed.  Those  who  feel  the  specta 
cle  as  they  feel  it  will  always  understand  them  enough, 
and  any  writer — even  those  who  risk  less  —  may  be 
misunderstood  by  readers  who  have  not  that  sympa 
thy.  Of  course  the  general  truth  remains  that  if  you 
wish  to  compete  with  the  painter  prose  is  a  rounda 
bout  vehicle,  and  it  is  simpler  to  adopt  the  painter's 
tools.  To  this  MM.  de  Goncourt  would  doubtless 
have  replied  that  there  is  no  use  of  words  that  is  not 
an  endeavor  to  "  render,"  that  lines  of  division  are  ar- 


JOURNAL  OF  THE  BROTHERS  DE  GONCOURT  221 

rogant  and  arbitrary,  that  the  point  at  which  the  pen 
should  give  way  to  the  brush  is  a  matter  of  apprecia 
tion,  that  the  only  way  to  see  what  it  can  do,  in  cer 
tain  directions  of  ingenuity,  is  to  try,  and  that  they 
themselves  have  the  merit  of  having  tried  and  found 
out.  What  they  have  found  out,  what  they  show  us, 
is  not  certainly  of  the  importance  that  all  the  irri 
tation,  all  the  envy  and  uncharitablenes^  of  their 
Journal  would  seem  to  announce  for  compositions 
brought  forth  in  such  throes ,  but  the  fact  that  they 
themselves  make  too  much  of  their  genius  should  not 
lead  us  to  make  too  little.  Artists  will  find  it  diffi 
cult  to  forgive  them  for  introducing  such  a  confusion 
between  aesthetics  and  ill-humor.  That  is  compro 
mising  to  the  cause,  for  it  tends  to  make  the  artistic 
spirit  synonymous  with  the  ungenerous.  When  one 
has  the  better  thoughts  one  doesn't  print  the  worse. 
We  have  never  been  ignorant  of  the  fact  that  talent 
may  be  considerable  even  when  character  is  peevish ; 
that  is  a  mystery  which  we  have  had  to  accept.  It 
is  a  poor  reward  for  our  philosophy  that  Providence 
should  appoint  MM.  de  Goncourt  to  insist  upon  the 
converse  of  the  proposition  during  three  substantial 
volumes. 

1888. 


BROWNING  IN  WESTMINSTER  ABBEY 

THE  lovers  of  a  great  poet  are  the  people  in  the 
world  who  are  most  to  be  forgiven  a  little  wanton 
fancy  about  him,  for  they  have  before  them,  in  his 
genius  and  work,  an  irresistible  example  of  the  ap 
plication  of  the  imaginative  method  to  a  thousand 
subjects.  Certainly,  therefore,  there  are  many  con 
firmed  admirers  of  Robert  Browning  to  whom  it  will 
not  have  failed  to  occur  that  the  consignment  of  his 
ashes  to  the  great  temple  of  fame  of  the  English 
race  was  exactly  one  of  those  occasions  in  which 
his  own  analytic  spirit  would  have  rejoiced  and  his 
irrepressible  faculty  for  looking  at  human  events  in 
all  sorts  of  slanting  colored  lights  have  found  a 
signal  opportunity.  If  he  had  been  taken  with  it  as 
a  subject,  if  it  had  moved  him  to  the  confused  yet 
comprehensive  utterance  of  which  he  was  the  great 
professor,  we  can  immediately  guess  at  some  of  the 
sparks  he  would  have  scraped  from  it,  guess  how 
splendidly,  in  the  case,  the  pictorial  sense  would 
have  intertwined  itself  with  the  metaphysical.  For 
such  an  occasion  would  have  lacked,  for  the  author 
of  "The  Ring  and  the  Book,"  none  of  the  complexity 
and  convertibility  that  were  dear  to  him.  Passion 
and  ingenuity,  irony  and  solemnity,  the  impressive 


BROWNING    IN    WESTMINSTER    ABBEY  223 

and  the  unexpected,  would  each  have  forced  their 
way  through ;  in  a  word,  the  author  would  have  been 
sure  to  take  the  special,  circumstantial  view  (the  in 
veterate  mark  of  all  his  speculation)  even  of  so  fore 
gone  a  conclusion  as  that  England  should  pay  her 
greatest  honor  to  one  of  her  greatest  poets.  At  any 
rate,  as  they  stood  in  the  Abbey  on  Tuesday  last 
those  of  his  admirers  and  mourners  who  were  dis 
posed  to  profit  by  his  warrant  for  inquiring  curiously, 
may  well  have  let  their  fancy  range,  with  its  muffled 
step,  in  the  direction  which  his  fancy  would  proba 
bly  not  have  shrunk  from  following,  even  perhaps 
to  the  dim  corners  where  humor  and  the  whimsical 
lurk.  Only,  we  hasten  to  add,  it  would  have  taken 
Robert  Browning  himself  to  render  the  multifold  im 
pression. 

One  part  of  it  on  such  an  occasion  is,  of  course, 
irresistible  —  the  sense  that  these  honors  are  the 
greatest  that  a  generous  nation  has  to  confer,  and 
that  the  emotion  that  accompanies  them  is  one  of 
the  high  moments  of  a  nation's  life.  The  attitude 
of  the  public,  of  the  multitude,  at  such  hours,  is  a 
great  expansion,  a  great  openness  to  ideas  of  as 
piration  and  achievement ;  the  pride  of  possession 
and  of  bestowal,  especially  in  the  case  of  a  career 
so  complete  as  Mr.  Browning's,  is  so  present  as  to 
make  regret  a  minor  matter.  We  possess  a  great 
man  most  when  we  begin  to  look  at  him  through 
the  glass  plate  of  death ;  and  it  is  a  simple  truth, 
though  containing  an  apparent  contradiction,  that 
the  Abbey  never  strikes  us.  so  benignantly  as  when 


224  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND   ELSEWHERE 

we  have  a  valued  voice  to  commit  to  silence  there. 
For  the  silence  is  articulate  after  all,  and  in  worthy 
instances  the  preservation  great.  It  is  the  other  side 
of  the  question  that  would  pull  most  the  strings  of 
irresponsible  reflection — all  those  conceivable  postu 
lates  and  hypotheses  of  the  poetic  and  satiric  mind 
to  which  we  owe  the  picture  of  how  the  bishop  or 
dered  his  tomb  in  St.  Praxed's.  Macaulay's  "  temple 
of  silence  and  reconciliation  "  —  and  none  the  less 
perhaps  because  he  himself  is  now  a  presence  there 
— strikes  us,  as  we  stand  in  it,  not  only  as  local  but 
as  social  —  a  sort  of  corporate  company ;  so  thick, 
under  its  high  arches,  its  dim  transepts  and  chapels, 
is  the  population  of  its  historic  names  and  figures. 
They  are  a  company  in  possession,  with  a  high 
standard  of  distinction,  of  immortality,  as  it  were  ; 
for  there  is  something  serenely  inexpugnable  even  in 
the  position  of  the  interlopers.  As  they  look  out, 
in  the  rich  dusk,  from  the  cold  eyes  of  statues  and 
the  careful  identity  of  tablets,  they  seem,  with  their 
converging  faces,  to  scrutinize  decorously  the  claims 
of  each  new  recumbent  glory,  to  ask  each  other  how 
he  is  to  be  judged  as  an  accession.  How  difficult 
to  banish  the  idea  that  Robert  Browning  would  have 
enjoyed  prefiguring  and  disintegrating  the  mystifica 
tions,  the  reservations,  even  perhaps  the  slight  buzz 
of  scandal  in  the  Poets'  Corner,  to  which  his  own 
obsequies  might  give  rise  !  Would  not  his  great 
relish,  in  so  characteristic  an  interview  with  his  cru 
cible,  have  been  his  perception  of  the  bewildering 
modernness,  to  much  of  the  society,  of  the  new 


BROWNING    IN    WESTMINSTER    ABBEY  225 

candidate  for  a  niche  ?  That  is  the  interest  and  the 
fascination,  from  what  may  be  termed  the  inside  point 
of  view,  of  Mr.  Browning's  having  received,  in  this 
direction  of  becoming  a  classic,  the  only  official  as 
sistance  that  is  ever  conferred  upon  English  writers. 
It  is  as  classics  on  one  ground  and  another  — 
some  members  of  it  perhaps  on  that  of  not  being 
anything  else  —  that  the  numerous  assembly  in  the 
Abbey  holds  together,  and  it  is  as  a  tremendous 
and  incomparable  modern  that  the  author  of  "  Men 
and  Women  "  takes  his  place  in  it.  He  introduces 
to  his  predecessors  a  kind  of  contemporary  indi 
vidualism  which  surely  for  many  a  year  they  had 
not  been  reminded  of  with  any  such  force.  The 
tradition  of  the  poetic  character  as  something  high, 
detached,  and  simple,  which  may  be  assumed  to  have 
prevailed  among  them  for  a  good  while,  is  one  that 
Browning  has  broken  at  every  turn  ;  so  that  we  can 
imagine  his  new  associates  to  stand  about  him,  till 
they  have  got  used  to  him,  with  rather  a  sense  of 
failing  measures.  A  good  many  oddities  and  a  good 
many  great  writers  have  been  entombed  in  the  Ab 
bey  ;  but  none  of  the  odd  ones  have  been  so  great 
and  none  of  the  great  ones  so  odd.  There  are 
plenty  of  poets  whose  right  to  the  title  may  be  con 
tested,  but  there  is  no  poetic  head  of  equal  power 
—  crowned  and  recrowned  by  almost  importunate 
hands — from  which  so  many  people  would  withhold 
the  distinctive  wreath.  All  this  will  give  the  marble 
phantoms  at  the  base  of  the  great  pillars  and  the 
definite  personalities  of  the  honorary  slabs  some- 
'5 


226  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON    AND    ELSEWHERE 

thing  to  puzzle  out  until,  by  the  quick  operation 
of  time,  the  mere  fact  of  his  lying  there  among  the 
classified  and  protected  makes  even  Robert  Brown 
ing  lose  a  portion  of  the  bristling  surface  of  his 
actuality. 

For  the  rest,  judging  from  the  outside  and  with 
his  contemporaries,  we  of  the  public  can  only  feel 
that  his  very  modernness  —  by  which  we  mean  the 
all-touching,  all-trying  spirit  of  his  work,  permeated 
with  accumulations  and  playing  with  knowledge  — 
achieves  a  kind  of  conquest,  or  at  least  of  extension, 
of  the  rigid  pale.  We  cannot  enter  here  upon  any 
account  either  of  that  or  of  any  other  element  of  his 
genius,  though  surely  no  literary  figure  of  our  day 
seems  to  sit  more  unconsciously  for  the  painter. 
The  very  imperfections  of  this  original  are  fascinat 
ing,  for  they  never  present  themselves  as  weaknesses 
—  they  are  boldnesses  and  overgrowths,  rich  rough 
nesses  and  humors — and  the  patient  critic  need  not 
despair  of  digging  to  the  primary  soil  from  which 
so  many  disparities  and  contradictions  spring.  He 
may  finally  even  put  his  finger  on  some  explanation 
of  the  great  mystery,  the  imperfect  conquest  of  the 
poetic  form  by  a  genius  in  which  the  poetic  passion 
had  such  volume  and  range.  He  may  successfully 
say  how  it  was  that  a  poet  without  a  lyre  —  for 
that  is  practically  Browning's  deficiency :  he  had 
the  scroll,  but  not  often  the  sounding  strings — was 
nevertheless,  in  his  best  hours,  wonderfully  rich  in 
the  magic  of  his  art,  a  magnificent  master  of  poetic 
emotion.  He  will  justify  on  behalf  of  a  multitude 


BROWNING    IN    WESTMINSTER  ABBEY  227 

of  devotees  the  great  position  assigned  to  a  writer 
of  verse  of  which  the  nature  or  the  fortune  has  been 
(in  proportion  to  its  value  and  quantity)  to  be 
treated  rarely  as  quotable.  He  will  do  all  this  and 
a  great  deal  more  besides ;  but  we  need  not  wait  for 
it  to  feel  that  something  of  our  latest  sympathies, 
our  latest  and  most  restless  selves,  passed  the  other 
day  into  the  high  part  —  the  show-part,  to  speak 
vulgarly — of  our  literature.  To  speak  of  Mr.  Brown 
ing  only  as  he  was  in  the  last  twenty  years  of  his 
life,  how  quick  such  an  imagination  as  his  would 
have  been  to  recognize  all  the  latent  or  mystical 
suitabilities  that,  in  the  last  resort,  might  link  to  the 
great  Valhalla  by  the  Thames  a  figure  that  had  be 
come  so  conspicuously  a  figure  of  London  !  He  had 
grown  to  be  intimately  and  inveterately  of  the  Lon 
don  world  ;  he  was  so  familiar  and  recurrent,  so  re 
sponsive  to  all  its  solicitations,  that,  given  the  end 
less  incarnations  he  stands  for  to-day,  he  would  have 
been  missed  from  the  congregation  of  worthies  whose 
memorials  are  the  special  pride  of  the  Londoner. 
Just  as  his  great  sign  to  those  who  knew  him  was 
that  he  was  a  force  of  health,  of  temperament,  of 
tone,  so  what  he  takes  into  the  Abbey  is  an  immense 
expression  of  life — of  life  rendered  with  large  liberty 
and  free  experiment,  with  an  unprejudiced  intellect 
ual  eagerness  to  put  himself  in  other  people's  place, 
to  participate  in  complications  and  consequences  — 
a  restlessness  of  psychological  research  that  might 
well  alarm  any  pale  company  for  their  formal  ortho 
doxies. 


228  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

But  the  illustrious  whom  he  rejoins  may  be  re 
assured,  as  they  will  not  fail  to  discover :  in  so  far 
as  they  are  representative  it  will  clear  itself  up  that, 
in  spite  of  a  surface  unsuggestive  of  marble  and  a 
reckless  individualism  of  form,  he  is  quite  as  repre 
sentative  as  any  of  them.  For  the  great  value  of 
Browning  is  that  at  bottom,  in  all  the  deep  spiritual 
and  human  essentials,  he  is  unmistakably  in  the 
great  tradition — is,  with  all  his  Italianisms  and  cos 
mopolitanisms,  all  his  victimization  by  societies  or 
ganized  to  talk  about  him,  a  magnificent  example 
of  the  best  and  least  dilettantish  English  spirit. 
That  constitutes  indeed  the  main  chance  for  his 
eventual  critic,  who  will  have  to  solve  the  refreshing 
problem  of  how,  if  subtleties  be  not  what  the  Eng 
lish  spirit  most  delights  in,  the  author  of,  for  in 
stance,  "  Any  Wife  to  Any  Husband  "  made  them  his 
perpetual  pasture  and  yet  remained  typically  of  his 
race.  He  was,  indeed,  a  wonderful  mixture  of  the 
universal  and  the  alembicated.  But  he  played  with 
the  curious  and  the  special,  they  never  submerged 
him,  and  it  was  a  sign  of  his  robustness  that  he 
could  play  to  the  end.  His  voice  sounds  loudest, 
and  also  clearest,  for  the  things  that,  as  a  race,  we 
like  best — the  fascination  of  faith,  the  acceptance  of 
life,  the  respect  for  its  mysteries,  the  endurance 
of  its  charges,  the  vitality  of  the  will,  the  validity 
of  character,  the  beauty  of  action,  the  seriousness, 
above  all,  of  the  great  human  passion.  If  Browning 
had  spoken  for  us  in  no  other  way,  he  ought  to  have 
been  made  sure  of,  tamed,  and  chained  as  a  classic, 


BROWNING    IN    WESTMINSTER    ABBEY  22Q 

on  account  of  the  extraordinary  beauty  of  his  treat 
ment  of  the  special  relation  between  man  and 
woman.  It  is  a  complete  and  splendid  picture  of 
the  matter,  which  somehow  places  it  at  the  same 
time  in  the  region  of  conduct  and  responsibility. 
But  when  we  talk  of  Robert  Browning's  speaking 
"  for  us,"  we  go  to  the  end  of  our  privilege,  we  say 
all.  With  a  sense  of  security,  perhaps  even  a  cer 
tain  complacency,  we  leave  our  sophisticated  mod 
ern  conscience,  and  perhaps  even  our  heterogeneous 
modern  vocabulary,  in  his  charge  among  the  illus 
trious.  There  will  possibly  be  moments  in  which 
these  things  will  seem  to  us  to  have  widened  the 
allowance,  made  the  high  abode  more  comfortable 
for  some  of  those  who  are  yet  to  enter  it. 

1890 


HENRIK   IBSEN 


ON   THE   OCCASION   OF  HEDDA    GABLER 

WHETHER  or  no  Henrik  Ibsen  be  a  master  of  his 
art,  he  has  had  a  fortune  that,  in  the  English-speak 
ing  world,  falls  not  always  even  to  the  masters — 
the  fortune  not  only  of  finding  himself  the  theme  of 
many  pens  and  tongues,  but  the  rarer  privilege  and 
honor  of  acting  as  a  sort  of  register  of  the  critical 
atmosphere,  a  barometer  of  the  intellectual  weather. 
Interesting  or  not  in  himself  (the  word  on  this  point 
varies  from  the  fullest  affirmation  to  the  richest  de 
nial),  he  has  sounded  in  our  literary  life  a  singu 
larly  interesting  hour.  At  any  rate,  he  himself  con 
stitutes  an  episode,  an  event,  if  the  sign  of  such 
action  be  to  have  left  appearances  other  than  you 
found  them.  He  has  cleared  up  the  air  we  breathe 
and  set  a  copy  to  our  renouncement;  has  made 
many  things  wonderfully  plain  and  quite  mapped 
out  the  prospect.  Whenever  such  service  is  ren 
dered,  the  attentive  spirit  is  the  gainer ;  these  are 
its  moments  of  amplest  exercise.  Illusions  are  sweet 
to  the  dreamer,  but  not  so  to  the  observer,  who  has 


HENRIK    IBSEN  231 

a  horror  of  a  fool's  paradise.  Henrik  Ibsen  will 
have  led  him  inexorably  into  the  rougher  road.  Such 
recording  and  illuminating  agents  are  precious  ;  they 
tell  us  where  we  are  in  the  thickening  fog  of  life, 
and  we  feel  for  them  much  of  the  grateful  respect 
excited  in  us  at  sea,  in  dim  weather,  by  the  ex 
hibition  of  the  mysterious  instrument  with  which 
the  captain  takes  an  observation.  We  have  held 
Ghosts,  or  Rosmersholm,  or  Hedda  Gabler  in  our 
hand,  and  they  have  been  our  little  instrument  — 
they  have  enabled  us  to  emulate  the  wary  mar 
iner  ;  the  consequence  of  which  is  that  we  know 
at  least  on  what  shores  we  may  ground  or  in  what 
ports  we  may  anchor.  The  author  of  these  strange 
works  has,  in  short,  performed  a  function  which  was 
doubtless  no  part  of  his  purpose.  This  was  to  tell 
us  about  his  own  people  ;  yet  what  has  primarily 
happened  is  that  he  has  brought  about  an  exhibi 
tion  of  ours. 

It  is  a  truly  remarkable  show,  for  as  to  where  nous 
en  sommcs,  as  the  phrase  goes,  in  the  art  of  criticism 
and  the  movement  of  curiosity,  as  to  our  accumula 
tions  of  experience  and  our  pliancy  of  intelligence, 
our  maturity  of  judgment  and  our  distinction  of  tone, 
our  quick  perception  of  quality  and  (peculiar  glory 
of  our  race)  our  fine  feeling  for  shades,  he  has  been 
the  means  of  our  acquiring  the  most  copious  infor 
mation.  Whether  or  no  we  may  say  that  as  a  se 
quel  to  this  we  know  Dr.  Ibsen  better,  we  may  at 
least  say  that  we  know  more  about  ourselves.  We 
glow  with  the  sense  of  how  we  may  definitely  look 


232  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

to  each  other  to  take  things,  and  that  is  an  immense 
boon,  representing  in  advance  a  wonderful  economy 
of  time,  a  saving  of  useless  effort  and  vain  ap 
peal.  The  great  clarifying  fact  has  been  that,  with 
Hedda  Gabler  and  Ghosts  and  all  the  rest,  we  have 
stood  in  an  exceptionally  agitated  way  in  the  pres 
ence  of  the  work  of  art,  and  have  gained  thereby 
a  peculiarly  acute  consciousness  of  how  we  tend  to 
consider  it.  It  has  been  interesting  to  perceive  that 
we  consider  the  work  of  art  with  passion,  with  some 
thing  approaching  to  fury.  Under  its  influence  we 
sweep  the  whole  keyboard  of  emotion,  from  frantic 
enjoyment  to  ineffable  disgust.  Resentment  and 
reprobation  happen  to  have  been  indeed  in  the  case 
before  us  the  notes  most  frequently  sounded ;  but 
this  is  obviously  an  accident,  not  impairing  the  value 
of  the  illustration,  the  essence  of  which  is  that  our 
critical  temper  remains  exactly  the  na'if  critical  tem 
per,  the  temper  of  the  spectators  in  the  gallery  of 
the  theatre  who  howl  at  the  villain  of  the  play. 

It  has  been  the  degree,  in  general,  of  the  agita 
tion  that  has  been  remarkable  in  the  case  before 
us,  as  may  conveniently  be  gathered  from  a  glance 
at  the  invaluable  catalogue  of  denouncements  drawn 
up  by  Mr.  William  Archer  after  perusal  of  the  arti 
cles  lately  dedicated  by  the  principal  London  jour 
nals  to  a  couple  of  representations  of  Ibsen  :  that, 
if  I  mistake  not,  of  Ghosts  and  that  of  Rosmers- 
holm.  This  catalogue  is  a  precious  document, 
one  of  those  things  that  the  attentive  spirit  would 
not  willingly  let  die.  It  is  a  thing,  at  any  rate,  to 


HENRIK    IBSEN 


233 


be  kept  long  under  one's  hand,  as  a  mine  of  sug 
gestion  and  reference ;  for  it  illuminates,  in  this 
matter  of  the  study  of  Ibsen,  the  second  character 
istic  of  our  emotion  (the  first,  as  I  have  mentioned, 
being  its  peculiar  intensity)  :  the  fact  that  that  emo 
tion  is  conspicuously  and  exclusively  moral,  one  of 
those  cries  of  outraged  purity  which  have  so  often 
and  so  pathetically  resounded  through  the  Anglo- 
Saxon  world. 

We  have  studied  our  author,  it  must  be  admitted, 
under  difficulties,  for  it  is  impossible  to  read  him 
without  perceiving  that  merely  book  in  hand  we  but 
half  know  him — he  addresses  himself  so  substan 
tially  to  representation.  This  quickens  immensely 
our  consideration  for  him,  since  in  proportion  as  we 
become  conscious  that  he  has  mastered  an  exceed 
ingly  difficult  form  are  we  naturally  reluctant,  in 
honor,  to  judge  him  unaccompanied  by  its  advan 
tages,  by  the  benefit  of  his  full  intention.  Consid 
ering  how  much  Ibsen  has  been  talked  about  in 
England  and  America,  he  has  been  lamentably  little 
seen  and  heard.  Until  Hedda  Gablcr  was  produced 
in  London  six  weeks  ago,  there  had  been  but  one 
attempt  to  represent  its  predecessors  that  had  con 
sisted  of  more  than  a  single  performance.  This 
circumstance  has  given  a  real  importance  to  the  un 
dertaking  of  the  two  courageous  young  actresses 
who  have  brought  the  most  recent  of  the  author's 
productions  to  the  light,  and  who  have  promptly 
found  themselves  justified  in  their  talent  as  well  as 
in  their  energy.  It  was  a  proof  of  Ibsen's  force 


234  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

that  he  had  made  us  chatter  about  him  so  profusely 
without  the  aid  of  the  theatre ;  but  it  was  even  more 
a  blessing  to  have  the  aid  at  last.  The  stage  is  to 
the  prose  drama  (and  Ibsen's  later  manner  is  the 
very  prose  of  prose)  what  the  tune  is  to  the  song  or 
the  concrete  case  to  the  general  law.  It  immedi 
ately  becomes  apparent  that  he  needs  the  test  to 
show  his  strength  and  the  frame  to  show  his  pict 
ure.  An  extraordinary  process  of  vivification  takes 
place ;  the  conditions  seem  essentially  enlarged. 
Those  of  the  stage  in  general  strike  us  for  the  most 
part  as  small  enough,  so  that  the  game  played  in 
them  is  often  not  more  inspiring  than  a  successful 
sack-race.  But  Ibsen  reminds  us  that  if  they  do 
not  in  themselves  confer  life  they  can  at  least  re 
ceive  it  when  the  infusion  is  artfully  attempted.  Yet 
how  much  of  it  they  were  doomed  to  receive  from 
Hcdda  Gabler  was  not  to  be  divined  till  we  had 
seen  Hedda  Gabler  in  the  frame.  The  play,  on 
perusal,  left  one  comparatively  muddled  and  mysti 
fied,  fascinated,  but — in  one's  intellectual  sympathy 
— snubbed.  Acted,  it  leads  that  sympathy  over  the 
straightest  of  roads  with  all  the  exhilaration  of  a  su 
perior  pace.  Much  more,  I  confess,  one  doesn't  get 
from  it ;  but  an  hour  of  refreshing  exercise  is  a 
reward  in  itself.  The  sense  of  being  moved  by  a 
scientific  hand  as  one  sits  in  one's  stall  has  not 
been  spoiled  for  us  by  satiety. 

Hedda  Gabler  then,  in  the  frame,  is  exceeding 
ly  vivid  and  curious,  and  a  part  of  its  interest  is 
in  the  way  it  lights  up  in  general  the  talent  of  the 


HENRIK    IBSEN  235 

author.  It  is  doubtless  not  the  most  complete  of 
Ibsen's  plays,  for  it  owes  less  to  its  subject  than 
to  its  form  ;  but  it  makes  good  his  title  to  the  pos 
session  of  a  real  method,  and  in  thus  putting  him 
before  us  as  a  master  it  exhibits  at  the  same  time 
his  irritating,  his  bewildering  incongruities.  He  is 
nothing,  as  a  literary  personality,  if  not  positive ; 
yet  there  are  moments  when  his  great  gift  seems 
made  up  of  negatives,  or  at  any  rate  when  the  total 
seems  a  contradiction  of  each  of  the  parts.  I  pre 
mise,  of  course,  that  we  hear  him  through  a  medium 
not  his  own,  and  I  remember  that  translation  is  a 
shameless  falsification  of  color.  Translation,  how 
ever,  is  probably  not  wholly  responsible  for  three 
appearances  inherent  in  all  his  prose  work,  as  we 
possess  it,  though  in  slightly  differing  degrees,  and 
yet  quite  unavailing  to  destroy  in  it  the  expression 
of  life  ;  I  mean,  of  course,  the  absence  of  humor,  the  \ 
absence  of  free  imagination,  and  the  absence  of 
style.  The  absence  of  style,  both  in  the  usual  and 
in  the  larger  sense  of  the  word,  is  extraordinary, 
and  all  the  more  mystifying  that  its  place  is  not 
usurped,  as  it  frequently  is  in  such  cases,  by  vul 
garity.  Ibsen  is  massively  common  and  "  middle- 
class,"  but  neither  his  spirit  nor  his  manner  is  small. 
He  is  never  trivial  and  never  cheap,  but  he  is 
in  nothing  more  curious  than  in  owing  to  a  single 
source  such  distinction  as  he  retains.  His  people 
are  of  inexpressive  race  ;  they  give  us  essentially  the 
bourgeois  impression  ;  even  when  they  are  furious 
ly  nervous  and,  like  Hedda,  more  than  sufficiently 


236  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

fastidious,  we  recognize  that  they  live,  with  their 
remarkable  creator,  in  a  world  in  which  selection 
has  no  great  range.  This  is  perhaps  one  reason 
why  they  none  of  them,  neither  the  creator  nor  the 
creatures,  appear  to  feel  much  impulse  to  play  with 
the  things  of  life.  This  impulse,  when  it  breaks  out, 
is  humor,  and  in  the  scenic  genius  it  usually  breaks 
out  in  one  place  or  another.  We  get  the  feeling,  in 
Ibsen's  plays,  that  such  whims  are  too  ultimate,  too 
much  a  matter  of  luxury  and  leisure  for  the  stage  of 
feeling  at  which  his  characters  have  arrived.  They 
are  all  too  busy  learning  to  live — humor  will  come 
in  later,  when  they  know  how.  A  certain  angular 
irony  they  frequently  manifest,  and  some  of  his  por 
traits  are  strongly  satirical,  like  that,  to  give  only 
two  instances,  of  Tesman,  in  Hedda  Gabler  (a  play 
indeed  suffused  with  irrepressible  irony),  or  that  of 
Hialmar  Ekdal,  in  The  Wild  Duck.  But  it  is  the 
ridicule  without  the  smile,  the  dance  without  the 
music,  a  sort  of  sarcasm  that  is  nearer  to  tears  than 
to  laughter.  There  is  nothing  very  droll  in  the 
world,  I  think,  to  Dr.  Ibsen ;  and  nothing  is  more 
interesting  than  to  see  how  he  makes  up  his  world 
without  a  joke.  Innumerable  are  the  victories  of 
talent,  and  art  is  a  legerdemain. 

It  is  always  difficult  to  give  an  example  of  an  ab 
sent  quality,  and,  if  the  romantic  is  even  less  present 
in  Ibsen  than  the  comic,  this  is  best  proved  by  the 
fact  that  everything  seems  to  us  inveterately  observed. 
Nothing  is  more  puzzling  to  the  readers  of  his  later 
work  than  the  reminder  that  he  is  the  great  dramatic 


HENRIK    IBSEN 


237 


poet  of  his  country,  or  that  the  author  of  The  Pil 
lars  of  Society  is  also  the  author  of  Brand  and 
Peer  Gynt,  compositions  which,  we  are  assured,  tes 
tify  to  an  audacious  imagination  and  abound  in  com 
plicated  fantasy.  In  his  satiric  studies  of  contem 
porary  life,  the  impression  that  is  strongest  with  us 
is  that  the  picture  is  infinitely  noted,  that  all  the  pa 
tience  of  the  constructive  pessimist  is  in  his  love  of 
the  detail  of  character  and  of  conduct,  in  his  way  of 
accumulating  the  touches  that  illustrate  them.  His 
recurrent  ugliness  of  surface,  as  it  were,  is  a  sort  of 
proof  of  his  fidelity  to  the  real  in  a  spare,  strenuous, 
democratic  community ;  just  as  the  same-  peculiarity 
is  one  of  the  sources  of  his  cjiarmlessjascination  —  a 
touching  vision  of  strong  forces  struggling  with  a 
poverty,  a  bare  provinciality,  of  life.  I  call  the  fasci 
nation  of  Ibsen  charmless  (for  those  who  feel  it  at 
all),  because  he  holds  us  without  bribing  us ;  he 
squeezes  the  attention  till  he  almost  hurts  it,  yet  with 
never  a  conciliatory  stroke.  He  has  as  little  as  pos 
sible  to  say  to  our  taste  ;  even  his  large,  strong  form 
takes  no  account  of  that,  gratifying  it  without  conces 
sions.  It  is  the  oddity  of  the  mixture  that  makes  him 
so  individual  —  his  perfect  practice  of  a  difficult  and 
delicate  art,  combined  with  such  agsthetic  density. 
Even  in  such  a  piece  as  The  Lady  from  the  Sea 
(much  the  weakest,  to  my  sense,  of  the  whole  series), 
in  which  he  comes  nearer  than  in  others  —  unless 
indeed  it  be  in  Hedda  Gabler — to  playing  with  an 
idea  from  the  simple  instinct  of  sport,  nothing  could 
be  less  picturesque  than  the  general  effect,  with  every 


238  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON    AND    ELSEWHERE 

inherent  incentive  to  have  made  it  picturesque.  The 
idea  might  have  sprung  from  the  fancy  of  Hawthorne, 
but  the  atmosphere  is  the  hard  light  of  Ibsen.  One 
feels  that  the  subject  should  have  been  tinted  and 
distanced ;  but,  in  fact,  one  has  to  make  an  atmos 
phere  as  one  reads,  and  one  winces  considerably 
under  Doctor  Wangd  and  the  pert  daughters. 

For  readers  without  curiosity  as  to  their  author's 
point  of  view  (and  it  is  doubtless  not  a  crime  not 
to  have  it,  though  I  think  it  is  a  misfortune,  an 
open  window  the  less),  there  is  too  much  of  Doctor 
Wangd  in  Ibsen  altogether — using  the  good  gentle 
man's  name  for  what  it  generally  represents  or  con 
notes.  It  represents  the  ugly  interior  on  which  his 
curtain  inexorably  rises,  and  which,  to  be  honest,  I 
like  for  the  queer  associations  it  has  taught  us  to  re 
spect :  the  hideous  carpet  and  wall-paper  and  cur 
tains  (one  may  answer  for  them),  the  conspicuous 
stove,  the  lonely  centre-table,  the  "  lamps  with  green 
shades,"  as  in  the  sumptuous  first  act  of  The  Wild 
Duck,  the  pervasive  air  of  small  interests  and  stand 
ards,  the  sign  of  limited  local  life.  It  represents  the 
very  clothes,  the  inferior  fashions,  of  the  figures  that 
move  before  us,  and  the  shape  of  their  hats  and  the 
tone  of  their  conversation  and  the  nature  of  their 
diet.  But  the  oddest  thing  happens  in  connection 
with  this  effect — the  oddest  extension  of  sympathy  or 
relaxation  of  prejudice.  What  happens  is  that  we  feel 
that  whereas,  if  Ibsen  were  weak  or  stupid  or  vulgar, 
this  parochial  or  suburban  stamp  would  only  be  a 
stick  to  beat  him  with ;  it  acts,  as  the  case  stands,  and 


HENRIK    IBSEN  239 

in  the  light  of  his  singular  masculinity,  as  a  sort  of 
substitute  —  a  little  clumsy,  if  you  like  —  for  charm. 
In  a  word,  it  becomes  touching,  so  that  practically  the 
blase  critical  mind  enjoys  it  as  a  refinement.  What 
occurs  is  very  analogous  to  what  occurs  in  our  ap 
preciation  of  the  dramatist's  remarkable  art,  his  ad 
mirable  talent  for  producing  an  intensity  of  interest 
by  means  incorruptibly  quiet,  by  that  almost  demure 
preservation  of  the  appearance  of  the  usual  in  which 
we  see  him  juggle  with  difficulty  and  danger  and 
which  constitutes,  as  it  were,  his  only  coquetry. 
There  are  people  who  are  indifferent  to  these  mild 
prodigies  ;  there  are  others  for  whom  they  will  always 
remain  the  most  charming  privilege  of  art. 

Hedda  Gabler  is  doubtless  as  suburban  as  any 
of  its  companions',  which  is  indeed  a  fortunate  cir 
cumstance,  inasmuch  as  if  it  were  less  so  we  should 
be  deprived  of  a  singularly  complete  instance  of  a 
phenomenon  difficult  to  express,  but  which  may  per-\ 
haps  be  described  as  the  operation  of  talent  without  I 
glamour.  There  is  notoriously  no  glamour  over  the  « 
suburbs,  and  yet  nothing  could  be  more  vivid  than 
Dr.  Ibsen's  account  of  the  incalculable  young  woman 
into  whom  Miss  Robins  so  artistically  projects  her 
self.  To  "  like  "  the  play,  as  we  phrase  it,  is  doubt 
less  therefore  to  give  one  of  the  fullest  examples  of 
our  constitutional  inability  to  control  our  affections. 
Several  of  the  spectators  who  have  liked  it  most  will 
probably  admit  even  that,  with  themselves,  this  senti 
ment  has  preceded  a  complete  comprehension.  They 
would  perhaps  have  liked  it  better  if  they  had  under- 


240  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

stood  it  better  —  as  to  this  they  are  not  sure ;  but 
they  at  any  rate  liked  it  well  enough.  Well  enough 
for  what?  the  question  may  of  course  always  be  in 
such  a  case.  To  be  absorbed,  assuredly,  which  is 
the  highest  tribute  we  can  pay  to  any  picture  of  life, 
and  a  higher  one  than  most  pictures  attempted  suc 
ceed  in  making  us  pay.  Ibsen  is  various,  and  Hed- 
da  Gabler  is  probably  an  ironical  pleasantry,  the  ar 
tistic  exercise  of  a  mind  saturated  with  the  vision  of 
human  infirmities ;  saturated,  above  all,  with  a  sense 
of  the  infinitude,  for  all  its  mortal  savor,  of  char 
acter,  finding  that  an  endless  romance  and  a  perpet 
ual  challenge.  Can  there  have  been  at  the  source  of 
such  a  production  a  mere  refinement  of  conscious 
power,  an  enjoyment  of  difficulty,  and  a  preconceived 
victory  over  it  ?  We  are  free  to  imagine  that  in  this 
case  Dr.  Ibsen  chose  one  of  the  last  subjects  that  an 
expert  might  have  been  expected  to  choose,  for  the 
harmless  pleasure  of  feeling  and  of  showing  that  he 
was  in  possession  of  a  method  that  could  make  up 
for  its  deficiencies. 

The  demonstration  is  complete  and  triumphant, 
but  it  does  not  conceal  from  us  —  on  the  contrary  — 
that  his  drama  is  essentially  that  supposedly  undra- 
matic  thing,  the  picture  not  of  an  action  but  of  a  con 
dition.  It  is  the  portrait  of  a  nature,  the  story  of 
what  Paul  Bourget  would  call  an  etat  d'ame,  and  of  a 
state  of  nerves  as  well  as  of  soul,  a  state  of  temper, 
of  health,  of  chagrin,  of  despair.  Hedda  Gabler  is, 
in  short,  the  study  of  an  exasperated  woman ;  and  it 
may  certainly  be  declared  that  the  subject  was  not 


HENRIK    IBSEN  241 

in  advance,  as  a  theme  for  scenic  treatment,  to  be 
pronounced  promising.  There  could  in  fact,  however, 
be  no  more  suggestive  illustration  of  the  folly  of  quar 
relling  with  an  artist  over  his  subject.  Ibsen  has  had 
only  to  take  hold  of  this  one  in  earnest  to  make  it, 
against  every  presumption,  live  with  an  intensity  of 
life.  One  can  doubtless  imagine  other  ways,  but  it  is 
enough  to  say  of  this  one  that,  put  to  the  test,  it  im 
poses  its  particular  spectacle.  Something  might  have 
been  gained,  entailing  perhaps  a  loss  in  another  di 
rection,  by  tracing  the  preliminary  stages,  showing 
the  steps  in  Mrs.  Tesman's  history  which  led  to  the 
spasm,  as  it  were,  on  which  the  curtain  rises  and  of 
which  the  breathless  duration  —  ending  in  death  —  is 
the  period  of  the  piece.  But  a  play  is  above  every 
thing  a  work  of  selection,  and  Ibsen,  with  his  curious 
and  beautiful  passion  for  the  unity  of  time  (carried 
in  him  to  a  point  which  almost  always  implies  also 
that  of  place),  condemns  himself  to  admirable  rigors. 
We  receive  Hedda  ripe  for  her  catastrophe,  and  if  we 
ask  for  antecedents  and  explanations  we  must  simply 
find  them  in  her  character.  Her  motives  are  just 
her  passions.  What  the  four  acts  show  us  is  these 
motives  and  that  character — complicated,  strange,  ir 
reconcilable,  infernal — playing  themselves  out.  We 
know  too  little  why  she  married  Tesman,  we  see  too 
little  why  she  ruins  Lovborg ;  but  we  recognize  that 
she  is  infinitely  perverse,  and  Heaven  knows  that,  as 
the  drama  mostly  goes,  the  crevices  we  are  called 
upon  to  stop  are  singularly  few.  That  Mrs.  Tesman 
is  a  perfectly  ill  -  regulated  person  is  a  matter  of 
16 


242  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON    AND    ELSEWHERE 

course,  and  there  are  doubtless  spectators  who  would 
fain  ask  whether  it  would  not  have  been  better  to 
represent  in  her  stead  a  person  totally  different.  The 
answer  to  this  sagacious  question  seems  to  me  to  be 
simply  that  no  one  can  possibly  tell.  There  are 
many  things  in  the  world  that  are  past  finding  out, 
and  one  of  them  is  whether  the  subject  of  a  work  had 
not  better  have  been  another  subject.  We  shall  al 
ways  do  well  to  leave  that  matter  to  the  author  (he 
may  have  some  secret  for  solving  the  riddle)  ;  so  ter 
rible  would  his  revenge  easily  become  if  we  were  to 
accept  a  responsibility  for  his  theme. 

The  distinguished  thing  is  the  firm  hand  that 
weaves  the  web,  the  deep  and  ingenious  use  made  of 
the  material.  What  material,  indeed,  the  dissentient 
spirit  may  exclaim,  and  what  "use,"  worthy  of  the 
sacred  name,  is  to  be  made  of  a  wicked,  diseased,  dis 
agreeable  woman  ?  That  is  just  what  Ibsen  attempts 
to  gauge,  and  from  the  moment  such  an  attempt  is 
resolute  the  case  ceases  to  be  so  simple.  The  "  use  " 
of  Hedda  Gabler  is  that  she  acts  on  others  and  that 
even  her  most  disagreeable  qualities  have  the  privi 
lege,  thoroughly  undeserved  doubtless,  but  equally  ir 
resistible,  of  becoming  a  part  of  the  history  of  others. 
And  then  one  isn't  so  sure  she  is  wicked,  and  by  no 
means  sure  (especially  when  she  is  represented  by  an 
actress  who  makes  the  point  ambiguous)  that  she  is 
disagreeable.  She  is  various  and  sinuous  and  grace 
ful,  complicated  and  natural ;  she  suffers,  she  strug 
gles,  she  is  human,  and  by  that  fact  exposed  to  a 
dozen  interpretations,  to  the  importunity  of  our  sus- 


HENRIK    IBSEN 


243 


pense.  Wrought  with  admirable  closeness  is  the 
whole  tissue  of  relations  between  the  five  people 
whom  the  author  sets  in  motion  and  on  whose  behalf 
he  asks  of  us  so  few  concessions.  That  is  for  the 
most  part  the  accomplished  thing  in  Ibsen,  the  thing 
that  converts  his  provincialism  into  artistic  urbanity. 
He  puts  ns  to  no  expense  worth  speaking  of  —  he 
takes  all  the  expense  himself.  I  mean  that  he  thinks 
out  our  entertainment  for  us  and  shapes  it  of  think 
able  things,  the  passions,  the  idiosyncrasies,  the  cu 
pidities  and  jealousies,  the  strivings  and  struggles, 
the  joys  and  sufferings  of  men.  The  spectator's  sit 
uation  is  different  enough  when  what  is  given  him  is 
the  mere  dead  rattle  of  the  surface  of  life,  into  which 
he  has  to  inject  the  element  of  thought,  the  "  hu 
man  interest."  Ibsen  kneads  the  soul  of  man  like  a 
paste,  and  often  with  a  rude  and  indelicate  hand  to 
which  the  soul  of  man  objects.  Such  a  production  as 
The  Pillars  of  Society,  with  its  large,  dense  complexity 
of  moral  cross-references  and  its  admirable  definite- 
ness  as  a  picture  of  motive  and  temperament  (the 
whole  canvas  charged,  as  it  were,  with  moral  color), 
such  a  production  asks  the  average  moral  man  to  see 
too  many  things  at  once.  It  will  never  help  Ibsen 
with  the  multitude  that  the  multitude  shall  feel  that 
the  more  it  looks  the  more  intentions  it  shall  see, 
for  of  such  seeing  of  many  intentions  the  multi 
tude  is  but  scantily  desirous.  It  keeps  indeed  a  pos 
itively  alarmed  and  jealous  watch  in  that  direction  ;  it 
smugly  insists  that  intentions  shall  be  rigidly  limited. 
This  sufficiently  answers  the  artless  question  of 


244  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON    AND    ELSEWHERE 

whether  it  may  be  hoped  for  the  author  of  The 
Pillars  of  Society  that  he  shall  acquire  popularity  in 
this  country.  In  what  country  under  heaven  might 
it  have  been  hoped  for  him,  or  for  the  particular 
community,  that  he  should  acquire  popularity  ?  Is 
he,  in  point  of  fact,  so  established  and  cherished 
in  the  Norwegian  theatre  ?  Do  his  countrymen  un 
derstand  him  and  clamor  for  him  and  love  him,  or 
do  they  content  themselves — a  very  different  affair — 
with  being  proud  of  him  when  aliens  abuse  him  ? 
The  rumor  reaches  us  that  Hedda  Gabkr  has  found 
no  favor  at  Copenhagen,  where  we  are  compelled 
to  infer  that  the  play  had  not  the  happy  interpreta 
tion  it  enjoys  in  London.  It  would  doubtless  have 
been  in  danger  here  if  tact  and  sympathy  had  not 
interposed.  We  hear  that  it  has  had  reverses  in 
Germany,  where  of  late  years  Ibsen  has  been  the 
fashion ,  but,  indeed,  all  these  are  matters  of  an 
order  as  to  which  we  should  have  been  grateful  for 
more  information  from  those  who  have  lately  had  the 
care  of  introducing  the  formidable  dramatist  to  the 
English  and  American  public.  He  excites,  for  exam 
ple,  in  each  case,  all  sorts  of  curiosity  and  conject 
ure  as  to  the  quality  and  capacity  of  the  theatre  to 
which,  originally,  such  a  large  order  was  addressed ; 
we  are  full  of  unanswered  questions  about  the  audi 
ence  and  the  school. 

What,  however,  has  most  of  all  come  out  in  our 
timid  and  desultory  experiments  is  that  the  author 
of  The  Pillars  of  Society  and  of  The  Doll's  House, 
of  Ghosts,  of  The  Wild  Duck,  of  Hedda  Gabkr,  is 


HENRIK    IBSEN  245 

destined  to  be  adored  by  the  "profession."  Even 
in  his  comfortless  borrowed  habit  he  will  remain 
intensely  dear  to  the  actor  and  the  actress.  He 
cuts  them  out  work  to  which  the  artistic  nature  in 
them  joyously  responds  —  work  difficult  and  interest 
ing,  full  of  stuff  and  opportunity.  The  opportunity 
that  he  gives  them  is  almost  always  to  do  the  deep 
and  delicate  thing — the  sort  of  chance  that,  in  pro 
portion  as  they  are  intelligent,  they  are  most  on  the 
lookout  for.  He  asks  them  to  paint  with  a  fine 
brush ;  for  the  subject  that  he  gives  them  is  ever 
our  plastic  humanity.  This  will  surely  preserve  him 
(leaving  out  the  question  of  serious  competition)  af 
ter  our  little  flurry  is  over.  It  was  what  made  the 
recent  representation  of  Hedda  Gabler  so  singularly 
interesting  and  refreshing.  It  is  what  gives  im 
portance  to  the  inquiry  as  to  how  his  call  for  "sub 
tlety  "  in  his  interpreters  has  been  met  in  his  own 
country.  It  was  impossible  the  other  day  not  to  be 
conscious  of  a  certain  envy  (as  of  a  case  of  artistic 
happiness)  of  the  representatives  of  the  mismated 
Tesmans  and  their  companions — so  completely,  as 
the  phrase  is,  were  they  "in  "  it  and  under  the  charm 
of  what  they  had  to  do.  In  fact,  the  series  of  Ibsen's 
"  social  dramas  "  is  a  dazzling  array  of  parts.  Nora 
Helmer  will  be  undertaken  again  and  again — of  a 
morning,  no  doubt,  as  supposedly,  though  oddly,  the 
more  "earnest"  hour — by  young  artists  justly  infatu 
ated.  The  temptation  is  still  greater  to  women  than 
to  men,  as  we  feel  in  thinking,  further,  of  the  Re 
becca  of  Rosmersholm  of  Lona  Hessel  and  Martha 


246  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON    AND    ELSEWHERE 

Bernick,  in  the  shapely  Pillars  of  the  passionate 
mother  and  the  insolent  maid,  in  the  extraordinarily 
compact  and  vivid  Ghosts — absurd  and  fascinating 
work ;  of  Mrs.  Linden,  so  quietly  tragic,  so  trem 
ulously  real,  in  The  Doll's  House  and  of  that  ir 
resistibly  touching  image,  so  untainted  with  cheap 
pathos,  Hedvig  Ekdal,  the  little  girl  with  failing  eyes, 
in  The  Wild  Duck  who  pores  over  her  story-book 
in  the  paltry  photographic  studio  of  her  intensely 
humbugging  father.  Such  a  figure  as  this  very  Hial- 
mar  Ekdal,  however,  the  seedy,  selfish — subtly  selfish 
and  self-deceptive — photographer,  in  whom  nothing 
is  active  but  the  tongue,  testifies  for  the  strong  mas 
culine  side  of  the  list.  If  The  League  of  Youth  is 
more  nearly  a  complete  comedy  than  any  other  of 
Ibsen's  prose  works,  the  comedian  who  should  at 
tempt  to  render  Stensgard  in  that  play  would  have  a 
real  portrait  to  reproduce.  But  the  examples  are  nu 
merous  :  Bernick  and  Rosmer,  Oswald  and  Manders 
(Ibsen's  compunctious  "pastors"  are  admirable),  Gre- 
gers  Werle,  the  transcendent  meddler  in  The  Wild 
Duck  Rorlund,  the  prudish  rector  in  the  Pillars, 
Stockmann  and  the  Burgomaster  in  The  Enemy  of 
the  People,  all  stand,  humanly  and  pictorially,  on 
their  feet. 

This  it  is  that  brings  us  back  to  the  author's  great 
quality,  the  quality  that  makes  him  so  interesting  in 
spite  of  his  limitations,  so  rich  in  spite  of  his  lapses 
— his  habit  of  dealing  essentially  with  the  individual 
caught  in  the  fact.  Sometimes,  no  doubt,  he  leans 
too  far  on  that  side,  loses  sight  too  much  of  the  type- 


HENRIK    IBSEN  247 

quality,  and  gives  his  spectators  free  play  to  say  that 
even  caught  in  the  fact  his  individuals  are  mad.  We 
are  not  at  all  sure,  for  instance,  of  the  type-quality  in 
Hedda.  Sometimes  he  makes  so  queer  a  mistake  as 
to  treat  a  pretty  motive,  like  that  of  The  Lady  from 
the  Sea,  in  a  poor  and  prosaic  way.  He  exposes 
himself  with  complacent,  with  irritating  indifference 
to  the  objector  as  well  as  to  the  scoffer,  he  makes  his 
"  heredity  "  too  short  and  his  consequences  too  long, 
he  deals  with  a  homely  and  uncesthetic  society,  he 
harps  on  the  string  of  conduct,  and  he  actually  talks 
of  stockings  and  legs,  in  addition  to  other  improprie 
ties.  He  is  not  pleasant  enough  nor  light  enough 
nor  casual  enough  ;  he  is  too  far  from  Piccadilly  and 
our  glorious  standards.  Therefore  his  cause  may  be 
said  to  be  lost ;  we  shall  never  take  him  to  our  hearts. 
It  was  never  to  have  been  expected,  indeed,  that  we 
should,  for  in  literature  religions  usually  grow  their 
own  gods,  and  our  heaven — as  every  one  can  see — is 
already  crowded.  But  for  those  who  care  in  general 
for  the  form  that  he  has  practised  he  will  always  re 
main  one  of  the  talents  that  have  understood  it  best 
and  extracted  most  from  it,  have  effected  most  neatly 
the  ticklish  transfusion  of  life.  If  we  possessed  the 
unattainable,  an  eclectic,  artistic,  disinterested  thea 
tre,  to  which  we  might  look  for  alternation  and  va 
riety,  it  would  simply  be  a  point  of  honor  in  such  a 
temple  to  sacrifice  sometimes  to  Henrik  Ibsen. 


248  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

II 

ON    THE   OCCASION   OF  THE  MASTER-BUILDER 

In  spite  of  its  having  been  announced  in  many 
quarters  that  Ibsen  would  never  do,  we  are  still  to 
have  another  chance,  which  may  very  well  not  be 
the  last,  of  judging  the  question  for  ourselves.  Not 
only  has  the  battered  Norseman  had,  in  the  evening 
of  his  career,  the  energy  to  fling  yet  again  into  the 
arena  one  of  those  bones  of  contention  of  which  he 
has  in  an  unequalled  degree  the  secret  of  possessing 
himself,  but  practised  London  hands  have  been  able 
to  catch  the  mystic  missile  in  its  passage  and  are 
flourishing  it,  as  they  have  flourished  others,  before 
our  eyes.  In  addition  to  an  opportunity  of  reading 
the  play,  I  have  had  the  pleasure  of  seeing  a  rehear 
sal  of  the  performance — so  that  I  already  feel  some 
thing  of  responsibility  of  that  inward  strife  which  is 
an  inevitable  heritage  of  all  inquiring  contact  with 
the  master.  It  is  perhaps  a  consequence  of  this 
irremediable  fever  that  one  should  recklessly  court 
the  further  responsibility  attached  to  uttering  an  im 
pression  into  which  the  premature  may  partly  enter. 
But  it  is  impossible,  in  any  encounter  with  Ibsen,  to 
resist  the  influence  of  at  least  the  one  kind  of  interest 
that  he  exerts  at  the  very  outset,  and  to  which  at  the 
present  hour  it  may  well  be  a  point  of  honor  promptly 
to  confess  one's  subjection.  This  immediate  kind  is 
the  general  interest  we  owe  to  the  refreshing  circum 
stance  that  he  at  any  rate  gives  us  the  sense  of  life, 


HENRIK    IBSEN  249 

and  the  practical  effect  of  which  is  ever  to  work  a 
more  or  less  irritating  spell.  The  other  kind  is  the 
interest  of  the  particular  production,  a  varying  quan 
tity  and  an  agreeable  source  of  suspense — a  happy 
occasion,  in  short,  for  that  play  of  intelligence,  that 
acuteness  of  response,  whether  in  assent  or  in  pro 
test,  which  it  is  the  privilege  of  the  clinging  theatre 
goer  to  look  forward  to  as  a  result  of  the  ingenious 
dramatist's  appeal,  but  his  sad  predicament,  for  the 
most  part,  to  miss  yet  another  and  another  chance  to 
achieve.  With  Ibsen  (and  that  is  the  exceptional 
joy,  the  bribe  to  rapid  submission)  we  can  always 
count  upon  the  chance.  Our  languid  pulses  quick 
en  as  we  begin  to  note  the  particular  direction  taken 
by  the  attack  on  a  curiosity  inhabiting,  by  way  of  a 
change,  the  neglected  region  of  the  brain. 

In  The  Master-It uilder  this  emotion  is  not  only 
kindled  very  early  in  the  piece — it  avails  itself  to  the 
full  of  the  right  that  Ibsen  always  so  liberally  con 
cedes  it  of  being  still  lively  after  the  piece  is  over. 
His  independence,  his  perversity,  his  intensity,  his 
vividness,  the  hard  compulsion  of  his  strangely  in 
scrutable  art,  are  present  in  full  measure,  together 
with  that  quality  which  comes  almost  uppermost 
when  it  is  a  question  of  seeing  him  on  the  stage, 
his  peculiar  blessedness  to  actors.  Their  reasons  for 
liking  him  it  would  not  be  easy  to  overstate ;  and, 
surely,  if  the  public  should  ever  completely  renounce 
him,  players  enamoured  of  their  art  will  still  be  found 
ready  to  interpret  him  for  that  art's  sake  to  empty 
benches.  No  dramatist  of  our  time  has  had  more 


250  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

the  secret,  and  has  kept  it  better,  of  making  their 
work  interesting  to  them.  The  subtlety  with  which 
he  puts  them  into  relation  to  it  eludes  analysis,  but 
operates  none  the  less  strongly  as  an  incitement. 
Does  it  reside  mainly  in  the  way  he  takes  hold  of 
their  imagination,  or  in  some  special  affinity  with 
their  technical  sense ;  in  what  he  gives  them,  or  in 
what  he  leaves  it  to  them  to  give ;  in  the  touches  by 
which  the  moral  nature  of  the  character  opens  out  a 
vista  for  them,  or  in  the  simple  fact  of  connection 
with  such  a  vivified  whole  ?  These  are  questions,  at 
any  rate,  that  Mr.  Herbert  Waring,  Miss  Robins, 
Miss  Moodie,  enviable  with  their  several  problems, 
doubtless  freely  ask  themselves,  or  even  each  other, 
while  the  interest  and  the  mystery  of  The  Master- 
Builder  fold  them  more  and  more  closely  in.  What 
is  incontestable  is  the  excitement,  the  amusement, 
the  inspiration  of  dealing  with  material  so  solid  and 
so  fresh.  The  very  difficulty  of  it  makes  a  common 
cause,  as  the  growing  ripeness  of  preparation  makes 
a  common  enthusiasm. 

I  shall  not  attempt  to  express  the  subject  of  the 
play  more  largely  than  to  say  that  its  three  acts  deal 
again,  as  Ibsen  is  so  apt  to  deal,  with  the  supremely 
critical  hour  in  the  life  of  an  individual,  in  the  his 
tory  of  a  soul.  The  individual  is  in  this  case  not  a 
Hedda  nor  a  Nora  nor  a  Mrs.  Alving  nor  a  Lady 
from  the  Sea,  but  a  prosperous  architect  of  Chris- 
tiania,  who,  on  reaching  a  robust  maturity,  encoun 
ters  his  fate  all  in  the  opening  of  a  door.  This  fate 
— infinitely  strange  and  terrible,  as  we  know  before 


HENRIK    IBSEN  251 

the  curtain  falls — is  foreshadowed  in  Miss  Elizabeth 
Robins,  who,  however,  in  passing  the  threshold,  lets 
in  a  great  deal  more  than  herself,  represents  a  hero 
ine  conceived,  as  to  her  effect  on  the  action,  with 
that  shameless  originality  which  Ibsen's  contemners 
call  wanton  and  his  admirers  call  fascinating.  Hilde 
Wangel,  a  young  woman  whom  the  author  may  well 
be  trusted  to  have  made  more  mystifying  than  her 
curiously  charmless  name  would  suggest,  is  only  the 
indirect  form,  the  animated  clock-face,  as  it  were,  of 
Halvard  Solness's  destiny ;  but  the  action,  in  spite 
of  obscurities  and  ironies,  takes  its  course  by  steps 
none  the  less  irresistible.  The  mingled  reality  and 
symbolism  of  it  all  give  us  an  Ibsen  within  an  Ibsen. 
His  subject  is  always,  like  the  subjects  of  all  first- 
rate  men,  primarily  an  idea ;  but  in  this  case  the  idea 
is  as  difficult  to  catch  as  its  presence  is  impossible  to 
overlook.  The  whole  thing  throbs  and  flushes  with 
it,  and  yet  smiles  and  mocks  at  us  through  it  as  if  in 
conscious  supersubtlety.  The  action,  at  any  rate,  is 
superficially  simple,  more  single  and  confined  than 
that  of  most  of  Ibsen's  other  plays ;  practically,  as 
it  defines  itself  and  rises  to  a  height,  it  leaves  the 
strange,  doomed  Solness,  and  the  even  stranger  ap 
parition  of  the  joyous  and  importunate  girl  (the  one 
all  memories  and  hauntings  and  bondages,  the  other 
all  health  and  curiosity  and  youthful  insolence)  face 
to  face  on  unprecedented  terms — terms,  however,  I 
hasten  to  add,  that  by  no  means  prevent  the  play 
from  being  one  to  which  a  young  lady,  as  they  say  in 
Paris,  may  properly  take  her  mother.  Of  all  Ibsen's 


252  ESSAYS   IN    LONDON   AND   ELSEWHERE 

heroines  Hilde  is,  indeed,  perhaps  at  once  the  most 
characteristic  of  the  author  and  the  most  void  of  of 
fence  to  the  "  general."  If  she  has  notes  that  recall 
Hedda,  she  is  a  Hedda  dangerous  precisely  because 
she  is  not  yet  blas'ee — a  Hedda  stimulating,  fully  benef 
icent  in  intention ;  in  short,  "  reversed,"  as  I  believe 
the  author  defined  her  to  his  interpreters.  From  her 
encounter  with  Halvard  Solness  many  remarkable 
things  arise,  but  most  of  all  perhaps  the  spectator's 
sense  of  the  opportunity  offered  by  the  two  rare  parts ; 
and  in  particular  of  the  fruitful  occasion  (for  Solness 
from  beginning  to  end  holds  the  stage)  seized  by  Mr. 
Herbert  Waring,  who  has  evidently  recognized  one 
of  those  hours  that  actors  sometimes  wait  long  years 
for — the  hour  that  reveals  a  talent  to  itself  as  well 
as  to  its  friends,  and  that  makes  a  reputation  take 
a  bound.  Whatever,  besides  refreshing  them,  The 
Master  -  Builder  does  for  Ibsen  with  London  play 
goers,  it  will  render  the  service  that  the  curious  little 
Norwegian  repertory  has  almost  always  rendered  the 
performers,  even  to  the  subsidiary  figures,  even  to  the 
touching  Kaia,  the  touching  Ragnar,  the  inevitable 
Dr.  Herdal,  and  the  wasted  wife  of  Solness,  so  care 
fully  composed  by  Miss  Moodie. 

1891-1893. 


MRS.  HUMPHRY  WARD 


AN  observer  of  manners,  called  upon  to  name  to 
day  the  two  things  that  make  it  most  completely 
different  from  yesterday  (by  which  I  mean  a  toler 
ably  recent  past),  might  easily  be  conceived  to 
mention  in  the  first  place  the  immensely  greater 
conspicuity  of  the  novel,  and  in  the  second  the  im 
mensely  greater  conspicuity  of  the  attitude  of  women. 
He  might  perhaps  be  supposed  even  to  go  on  to 
add  that  the  attitude  of  women  is  the  novel,  in  Eng 
land  and  America,  and  that  these  signs  of  the  times 
have  therefore  a  practical  unity.  The  union  is  rep 
resented,  at  any  rate,  in  the  high  distinction  of  Mrs. 
Humphry  Ward,  who  is  at  once  the  author  of  the 
work  of  fiction  that  has  in  our  hour  been  most 
widely  circulated  and  the  most  striking  example  of 
the  unprecedented  kind  of  attention  which  the  femi 
nine  mind  is  now  at  liberty  to  excite.  Her  position 
is  one  which  certainly  ought  to  soothe  a  myriad 
discontents,  to  show  the  superfluity  of  innumerable 
agitations.  No  agitation,  on  the  platform  or  in  the 
newspaper,  no  demand  for  a  political  revolution, 
ever  achieved  anything  like  the  publicity  or  roused 
anything  like  the  emotion  of  the  earnest  attempt  of 


254  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

this  quiet  English  lady  to  tell  an  interesting  story, 
to  present  an  imaginary  case.  "  Robert  Elsmere," 
in  the  course  of  a  few  weeks,  put  her  name  in  the 
mouths  of  the  immeasurable  English-reading  multi 
tude.  The  book  was  not  merely  an  extraordinarily 
successful  novel ;  it  was,  as  reflected  in  contempo 
rary  conversation,  a  momentous  public  event. 

No  example  could  be  more  interesting  of  the  way 
in  which  women,  after  prevailing  for  so  many  ages  in 
our  private  history,  have  begun  to  be  unchallenged 
contributors  to  our  public.  Very  surely  and  not  at 
all  slowly  the  effective  feminine  voice  makes  its  in 
genious  hum  the  very  ground-tone  of  the  uproar  in 
which  the  conditions  of  its  interference  are  discussed. 
So  many  presumptions  against  this  interference  have 
fallen  to  the  ground  that  it  is  difficult  to  say  which 
of  them  practically  remain.  In  England  to-day,  and 
in  the  United  States,  no  one  thinks  of  asking  whether 
or  no  a  book  be  by  a  woman,  so  completely,  to  the 
Anglo-American  sense,  has  the  tradition  of  the  dif 
ference  of  dignity  between  the  sorts  been  lost.  In 
France  the  tradition  flourishes,  but  literature  in 
France  has  a  different  perspective  and  another  air. 
Among  ourselves,  I  hasten  to  add,  and  without  in 
the  least  undertaking  to  go  into  the  question  of  the 
gain  to  literature  of  the  change,  the  position  achieved 
by  the  sex  formerly  overshadowed  has  been  a  well- 
fought  battle,  in  which  that  sex  has  again  and  again 
returned  to  the  charge.  In  other  words,  if  women 
take  up  (in  fiction  for  instance)  an  equal  room  in 
the  public  eye,  it  is  because  they  have  been  re- 


MRS.   HUMPHRY    WARD  255 

markably  clever.  They  have  carried  the  defences 
line  by  line,  and  they  may  justly  pretend  that  they 
have  at  last  made  the  English  novel  speak  their 
language.  The  history  of  this  achievement  will,  of 
course,  not  be  completely  written  unless  a  chapter 
be  devoted  to  the  resistance  of  the  men.  It  would 
probably  then  come  out  that  there  was  a  possible 
form  of  resistance,  of  the  value  of  which  the  men 
were  unconscious — a  fact  that  indeed  only  proves 
their  predestined  weakness. 

This  weakness  finds  itself  confronted  with  the 
circumstance  that  the  most  serious,  the  most  deliber 
ate,  and  most  comprehensive  attempt  made  in  Eng 
land  in  this  later  time  to  hold  the  mirror  of  prose 
fiction  up  to  life  has  not  been  made  by  one  of  the 
hitherto  happier  gentry.  There  may  have  been  works, 
in  this  line,  of  greater  genius,  of  a  spirit  more  instinc 
tive  and  inevitable,  but  I  am  at  a  loss  to  name  one 
of  an  intenser  intellectual  energy.  It  is  impossible 
to  read  "  Robert  Elsmere  "  without  feeling  it  to  be 
an  exceedingly  matured  conception,  and  it  is  difficult 
to  attach  the  idea  of  conception  at  all  to  most  of  the 
other  novels  of  the  hour ;  so  almost  invariably  do 
they  seem  to  have  come  into  the  world  only  at  the 
hour's  notice,  with  no  pre-natal  history  to  speak  of. 
Remarkably  interesting  is  the  light  that  Mrs.  Ward's 
celebrated  study  throws  upon  the  expectations  we 
are  henceforth  entitled  to  form  of  the  critical  faculty 
in  women.  The  whole  complicated  picture  is  a  slow, 
expansive  evocation,  bathed  in  the  air  of  reflection, 
infinitely  thought  out  and  constructed,  not  a  flash  of 


256  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

perception  nor  an  arrested  impression.  It  suggests 
the  image  of  a  large,  slow-moving,  slightly  old-fash 
ioned  ship,  buoyant  enough  and  well  out  of  water, 
but  with  a  close-packed  cargo  in  every  inch  of 
stowage-room.  One  feels  that  the  author  has  set 
afloat  in  it  a  complete  treasure  of  intellectual  and 
moral  experience,  the  memory  of  all  her  contacts 
and  phases,  all  her  speculations  and  studies. 

Of  the  ground  covered  by  this  broad-based  story 
the  largest  part,  I  scarcely  need  mention,  is  the 
ground  of  religion,  the  ground  on  which  it  is  re 
puted  to  be  most  easy  to  create  a  reverberation  in 
the  Anglo-Saxon  world.  "Easy"  here  is  evidently 
easily  said,  and  it  must  be  noted  that  the  greatest 
reverberation  has  been  the  product  of  the  greatest 
talent.  It  is  difficult  to  associate  "  Robert  Elsmere  " 
with  any  effect  cheaply  produced.  The  habit  of 
theological  inquiry  (if  indeed  the  term  inquiry  may 
be  applied  to  that  which  partakes  of  the  nature 
rather  of  answer  than  of  question)  has  long  been 
rooted  in  the  English  -  speaking  race ;  but  Mrs. 
Ward's  novel  would  not  have  had  so  great  a  fortune 
had  she  not  wrought  into  it  other  bribes  than  this. 
She  gave  it  indeed  the  general  quality  of  charm,  and 
she  accomplished  the  feat,  unique  so  far  as  I  re 
member  in  the  long  and  usually  dreary  annals  of 
the  novel  with  a  purpose,  of  carrying  out  her  pur 
pose  without  spoiling  her  novel.  The  charm  that 
was  so  much  wind  in  the  sails  of  her  book  was  a 
combination  of  many  things,  but  it  was  an  element 
in  which  culture — using  the  term  in  its  largest  sense 


MRS.   HUMPHRY   WARD  257 

— had  perhaps  most  to  say.  Knowledge,  curiosity, 
acuteness,  a  critical  faculty  remarkable  in  itself  and 
very  highly  trained,  the  direct  observation  of  life 
and  the  study  of  history,  strike  the  reader  of  "  Rob 
ert  Elsmere" — rich  and  representative  as  it  is — as 
so  many  strong  savors  in  a  fine  moral  ripeness,  a 
genial,  much -seeing  wisdom.  Life,  for  Mrs.  Hum 
phry  Ward,  as  the  subject  of  a  large  canvas,  means 
predominantly  the  life  of  the  thinking,  the  life  of 
the  sentient  creature,  whose  chronicler  at  the  present 
hour,  so  little  is  he  in  fashion,  it  has  been  almost  an 
originality  on  her  part  to  become.  The  novelist  is 
often  reminded  that  he  must  put  before  us  an  ac 
tion  ;  but  it  is,  after  all,  a  question  of  terms.  There 
are  actions  and  actions,  and  Mrs.  Ward  was  capable 
of  recognizing  possibilities  of  palpitation  without 
number  in  that  of  her  hero's  passionate  conscience, 
that  of  his  restless  faith.  Just  so  in  her  admirable 
appreciation  of  the  strange  and  fascinating  Amiel, 
she  found  in  his  throbbing  stillness  a  quantity  of  life 
that  she  would  not  have  found  in  the  snapping  of 
pistols. 

This  attitude  is  full  of  further  assurance  ;  it  gives 
us  a  grateful  faith  in  the  independence  of  view  of  the 
new  work  which  she  is  believed  lately  to  have  brought 
to  completion  and  as  to  which  the  most  absorbed  of 
her  former  readers  will  wish  her  no  diminution  of  the 
skill  that  excited,  on  behalf  of  adventures  and  situa 
tions  essentially  spiritual,  the  suspense  and  curiosity 
that  they  had  supposed  themselves  to  reserve  for 
mysteries  and  solutions  on  quite  another  plane. 


258  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON    AND    ELSEWHERE 

There  are  several  considerations  that  make  Mrs. 
Ward's  next  study  of  acute  contemporary  states  as 
impatiently  awaited  as  the  birth  of  an  heir  to  great 
possessions;  but  not  the  least  of  them  is  the  supreme 
example  its  fortune,  be  it  greater  or  smaller,  will  offer 
of  the  spell  wrought  to-day  by  the  wonderful  art  of 
fiction.  Could  there  be  a  greater  proof  at  the  same 
time  of  that  silent  conquest  that  I  began  by  speaking 
of,  the  way  in  which,  pen  in  hand,  the  accomplished 
sedentary  woman  has  come  to  represent  with  an 
authority  widely  recognized  the  multitudinous,  much- 
entangled  human  scene  ?  I  must  in  conscience  add 
that  it  has  not  yet  often  been  given  to  her  to  do  so 
with  the  number  of  sorts  of  distinction,  the  educated 
insight,  the  comprehensive  ardor  of  Mrs.  Humphry 
Ward. 

1891. 


CRITICISM 

IF  literary  criticism  may  be  said  to  flourish  among 
us  at  all,  it  certainly  flourishes  immensely,  for  it 
flows  through  the  periodical  press  like  a  river  that 
has  burst  its  dikes.  The  quantity  of  it  is  pro 
digious,  and  it  is  a  commodity  of  which,  however 
the  demand  may  be  estimated,  the  supply  will  be 
sure  to  be  in  any  supposable  extremity  the  last  thing 
to  fail  us.  What  strikes  the  observer  above  all,  in 
such  an  affluence,  is  the  unexpected  proportion  the 
discourse  uttered  bears  to  the  objects  discoursed  of 
—  the  paucity  of  examples,  of  illustrations  and  pro 
ductions,  and  the  deluge  of  doctrine  suspended  in 
the  void ;  the  profusion  of  talk  and  the  contraction 
of  experiment,  of  what  one  may  call  literary  conduct. 
This,  indeed,  ceases  to  be  an  anomaly  as  soon  as  we 
look  at  the  conditions  of  contemporary  journalism. 
Then  we  see  that  these  conditions  have  engendered 
the  practice  of  "  reviewing  "  —  a  practice  that  in 
general  has  nothing  in  common  with  the  art  of  crit 
icism.  Periodical  literature  is  a  huge,  open  mouth 
which  has  to  be  fed  —  a  vessel  of  immense  capac 
ity  which  has  to  be  filled.  It  is  like  a  regular  train 
which  starts  at  an  advertised  hour,  but  which  is  free 
to  start  only  if  every  seat  be  occupied.  The  seats 


260  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND   ELSEWHERE 

are  many,  the  train  is  ponderously  long,  and  hence 
the  manufacture  of  dummies  for  the  seasons  when 
there  are  not  passengers  enough.  A  stuffed  man- 
nikin  is  thrust  into  the  empty  seat,  where  it  makes 
a  creditable  figure  till  the  end  of  the  journey.  It 
looks  sufficiently  like  a  passenger,  and  you  know  it 
is  not  one  only  when  you  perceive  that  it  neither 
says  anything  nor  gets  out.  The  guard  attends  to 
it  when  the  train  is  shunted,  blows  the  cinders  from 
its  wooden  face  and  gives  a  different  crook  to  its 
elbow,  so  that  it  may  serve  for  another  run.  In  this 
way,  in  a  well-conducted  periodical,  the  blocks  of 
remplissage  are  the  dummies  of  criticism — the  recur 
rent,  regulated  breakers  in  the  tide  of  talk.  They 
have  a  reason  for  being,  and  the  situation  is  simpler 
when  we  perceive  it.  It  helps  to  explain  the  dispro 
portion  I  just  mentioned,  as  well,  in  many  a  case,  as 
the  quality  of  the  particular  discourse.  It  helps  us 
to  understand  that  the  "  organs  of  public  opinion  " 
must  be  no  less  copious  than  punctual,  that  publicity 
must  maintain  its  high  standard,  that  ladies  and 
gentlemen  may  turn  an  honest  penny  by  the  free 
expenditure  of  ink.  It  gives  us  a  glimpse  of  the 
high  figure  presumably  reached  by  all  the  honest 
pennies  accumulated  in  the  cause,  and  throws  us 
quite  into  a  glow  over  the  march  of  civilization  and 
the  way  we  have  organized  our  conveniences.  From 
this  point  of  view  it  might  indeed  go  far  towards 
making  us  enthusiastic  about  our  age.  What  is 
more  calculated  to  inspire  us  with  a  just  compla 
cency  than  the  sight  of  a  new  and  flourishing  in- 


CRITICISM  2OI 

dustry,  a  fine  economy  of  production  ?  The  great 
business  of  reviewing  has,  in  its  roaring  routine, 
many  of  the  signs  of  blooming  health,  many  of  the 
features  which  beguile  one  into  rendering  an  invol 
untary  homage  to  successful  enterprise. 

Yet  it  is  not  to  be  denied  that  certain  captious 
persons  are  to  be  met  who  are  not  carried  away  by 
the  spectacle,  who  look  at  it  much  askance,  who  see 
but  dimly  whither  it  tends,  and  who  find  no  aid  to 
vision  even  in  the  great  light  (about  itself,  its  spirit, 
and  its  purposes,  among  other  things)  that  it  might 
have  been  expected  to  diffuse.  "  Is  there  any  such 
great  light  at  all  ?"  we  may  imagine  the  most  rest 
less  of  the  sceptics  to  inquire,  "  and  isn't  the  effect 
rather  one  of  a  certain  kind  of  pretentious  and  un 
profitable  gloom  ?"  The  vulgarity,  the  crudity,  the 
stupidity  which  this  cherished  combination  of  the 
off-hand  review  and  of  our  wonderful  system  of  pub 
licity  have  put  into  circulation  on  so  vast  a  scale 
may  be  represented,  in  such  a  mood,  as  an  unprec 
edented  invention  for  darkening  counsel.  The  be 
wildered  spirit  may  ask  itself,  without  speedy  answer, 
What  is  the  function  in  the  life  of  man  of  such  a 
periodicity  of  platitude  and  irrelevance  ?  Such  a 
spirit  will  wonder  how  the  life  of  man  survives  it, 
and,  above  all,  what  is  much  more  important,  how 
literature  resists  it ;  whether,  indeed,  literature  does 
resist  it  and  is  not  speedily  going  down  beneath  it. 
The  signs  of  this  catastrophe  will  not  in  the  case 
we  suppose  be  found  too  subtle  to  be  pointed  out — 
the  failure  of  distinction,  the  failure  of  style,  the 


262  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

failure  of  knowledge,  the  failure  of  thought.  The 
case  is  therefore  one  for  recognizing  with  dismay 
that  we  are  paying  a  tremendous  price  for  the  dif 
fusion  of  penmanship  and  opportunity ;  that  the  mul 
tiplication  of  endowments  for  chatter  may  be  as  fatal 
as  an  infectious  disease;  that  literature  lives  essen 
tially,  in  the  sacred  depths  of  its  being,  upon  exam 
ple,  upon  perfection  wrought ;  that,  like  other  sensitive 
organisms,  it  is  highly  susceptible  of  demoralization, 
and  that  nothing  is  better  calculated  than  irrespon 
sible  pedagogy  to  make  it  close  its  ears  and  lips.  To 
be  puerile  and  untutored  about  it  is  to  deprive  it  of 
air  and  light,  and  the  consequence  of  its  keeping 
bad  company  is  that  it  loses  all  heart.  We  may,  of 
course,  continue  to  talk  about  it  long  after  it  has 
bored  itself  to  death,  and  there  is  every  appearance 
that  this  is  mainly  the  way  in  which  our  descendants 
will  hear  of  it.  They  will,  however,  acquiesce  in  its 
extinction. 

This,  I  am  aware,  is  a  dismal  conviction,  and  I 
do  not  pretend  to  state  the  case  gayly.  The  most  I 
can  say  is  that  there  are  times  and  places  in  which 
it  strikes  one  as  less  desperate  than  at  others.  One 
of  the  places  is  Paris,  and  one  of  the  times  is  some 
comfortable  occasion  of  being  there.  The  cus*  - 
of  rough-and-ready  reviewing  is,  among  the  French, 
much  less  rooted  than  with  us,  and  the  dignity  of 
criticism  is,  to  my  perception,  in  consequence  much 
higher.  The  art  is  felt  to  be  one  of  the  most  diffi 
cult,  the  most  delicate,  the  most  occasional ;  and  the 
material  on  which  it  is  exercised  is  subject  to  selec- 


CRITICISM  263 

tion,  to  restriction.  That  is,  whether  or  no  the 
French  are  always  right  as  to  what  they  do  notice, 
they  strike  me  as  infallible  as  to  what  they  don't. 
They  publish  hundreds  of  books  which  are  never 
noticed  at  all,  and  yet  they  are  much  neater  book 
makers  than  we.  It  is  recognized  that  such  volumes 
have  nothing  to  say  to  the  critical  sense,  that  they 
do  not  belong  to  literature,  and  that  the  possession 
of  the  critical  sense  is  exactly  what  makes  it  impos 
sible  to  read  them  and  dreary  to  discuss  them — 
places  them,  as  a  part  of  critical  experience,  out  of 
the  question.  The  critical  sense,  in  France,  ne  se 
derange  pas,  as  the  phrase  is,  for  so  little.  No  one 
would  deny,  on  the  other  hand,  that  when  it  does  set 
itself  in  motion  it  goes  further  than  with  us.  It 
handles  the  subject  in  general  with  finer  finger-tips. 
The  bluntness  of  ours,  as  tactile  implements  ad 
dressed  to  an  exquisite  process,  is  still  sometimes 
surprising,  even  after  frequent  exhibition.  We  blun 
der  in  and  out  of  the  affair  as  if  it  were  a  railway 
station  —  the  easiest  and  most  public  of  the  arts. 
It  is  in  reality  the  most  complicated  and  the  most 
particular.  The  critical  sense  is  so  far  from  fre 
quent  that  it  is  absolutely  rare,  and  the  possession 
of  the  cluster  of  qualities  that  minister  to  it  is  one 
of  the  highest  distinctions.  It  is  a  gift  inestimably 
precious  and  beautiful  ;  therefore,  so  far  from  think 
ing  that  it  passes  overmuch  from  hand  to  hand,  one 
knows  that  one  has  only  to  stand  by  the  counter  an 
hour  to  see  that  business  is  done  with  baser  coin. 
We  have  too  many  small  school-masters ;  yet  not 


264  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

only  do  I  not  question  in  literature  the  high  utility 
of  criticism,  but  I  should  be  tempted  to  say  that  the 
part  it  plays  may  be  the  supremely  beneficent  one 
when  it  proceeds  from  deep  sources,  from  the  effi 
cient  combination  of  experience  and  perception.  In 
this  light  one  sees  the  critic  as  the  real  helper  of  the 
artist,  a  torch-bearing  outrider,  the  interpreter,  the 
brother.  The  more  the  tune  is  noted  and  the  direc 
tion  observed  the  more  we  shall  enjoy  the  conve 
nience  of  a  critical  literature.  When  one  thinks  of 
the  outfit  required  for  free  work  in  this  spirit,  one 
is  ready  to  pay  almost  any  homage  to  the  intelli 
gence  that  has  put  it  on  ;  and  when  one  considers 
the  noble  figure  completely  equipped — armed  cap-a- 
pie  in  curiosity  and  sympathy — one  falls  in  love  with 
the  apparition.  It  certainly  represents  the  knight 
who  has  knelt  through  his  long  vigil  and  who  has 
the  piety  of  his  office.  For  there  is  something  sac 
rificial  in  his  function,  inasmuch  as  he  offers  himself 
as  a  general  touchstone.  To  lend  himself,  to  pro 
ject  himself  and  steep  himself,  to  feel  and  feel  till 
he  understands,  and  to  understand  so  well  that  he 
can  say,  to  have  perception  at  the  pitch  of  passion 
and  expression  as  embracing  as  the  air,  to  be  infi 
nitely  curious  and  incorrigibly  patient,  and  yet  plas 
tic  and  inflammable  and  determinable,  stooping  to 
conquer  and  serving  to  direct — these  are  fine  chances 
for  an  active  mind,  chances  to  add  the  idea  of  inde 
pendent  beauty  to  the  conception  of  success.  Just 
in  proportion  as  he  is  sentient  and  restless,  just  in 
proportion  as  he  reacts  and  reciprocates  and  pene- 


CRITICISM  265 

trates,  is  the  critic  a  valuable  instrument;  for  in 
literature  assuredly  criticism  is  the  critic,  just  as  art 
is  the  artist ;  it  being  assuredly  the  artist  who  in 
vented  art  and  the  critic  who  invented  criticism, 
and  not  the  other  way  round. 

And  it  is  with  the  kinds  of  criticism  exactly  as  it 
is  with  the  kinds  of  art — the  best  kind,  the  only  kind 
worth  speaking  of,  is  the  kind  that  springs  from  the 
liveliest  experience.  There  are  a  hundred  labels 
and  tickets,  in  all  this  matter,  that  have  been  pasted 
on  from  the  outside  and  appear  to  exist  for  the  con 
venience  of  passers-by ;  but  the  critic  who  lives  in 
the  house,  ranging  through  its  innumerable  cham 
bers,  knows  nothing  about  the  bills  on  the  front. 
He  only  knows  that  the  more  impressions  he  has 
the  more  he  is  able  to  record,  and  that  the  more  he 
is  saturated,  poor  fellow,  the  more  he  can  give  out. 
His  life,  at  this  rate,  is  heroic,  for  it  is  immensely 
vicarious.  He  has  to  understand  for  others,  to  an 
swer  for  them ;  he  is  always  under  arms.  He  knows 
that  the  whole  honor  of  the  matter,  for  him,  besides 
the  success  in  his  own  eyes,  depends  upon  his  being 
indefatigably  supple,  and  that  is  a  formidable  order. 
Let  me  not  speak,  however,  as  if  his  work  were  a 
conscious  grind,  for  the  sense  of  effort  is  easily  lost 
in  the  enthusiasm  of  curiosity.  Any  vocation  has 
its  hours  of  intensity  that  is  so  closely  connected 
with  life.  That  of  the  critic,  in  literature,  is  con 
nected  doubly,  for  he  deals  with  life  at  second-hand 
as  well  as  at  first ;  that  is,  he  deals  with  the  expe 
rience  of  others,  which  he  resolves  into  his  own, 


266  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON    AND    ELSEWHERE 

and  not  of  those  invented  and  selected  others  with 
whom  the  novelist  makes  comfortable  terms,  but 
with  the  uncompromising  swarm  of  authors,  the 
clamorous  children  of  history.  He  has  to  make  them 
as  vivid  and  as  free  as  the  novelist  makes  his  pup 
pets,  and  yet  he  has,  as  the  phrase  is,  to  take  them 
as  they  come.  We  must  be  easy  with  him  if  the 
picture,  even  when  the  aim  has  really  been  to  pene 
trate,  is  sometimes  confused,  for  there  are  baffling 
and  there  are  thankless  subjects ;  and  we  make 
everything  up  to  him  by  the  peculiar  purity  of  our 
esteem  when  the  portrait  is  really,  like  the  happy 
portraits  of  the  other  art,  a  text  preserved  by  trans 
lation. 

1891. 


AN   ANIMATED   CONVERSATION 

IT  took  place  accidentally,  after  dinner  at  a  hotel 
in  London,  and  I  can  pretend  to  transcribe  it  only 
as  the  story  was  told  me  by  one  of  the  interlocutors, 
who  was  not  a  professional  reporter.  The  general 
sense  of  it — but  general  sense  was  possibly  just  what 
it  lacked.  At  any  rate,  by  what  I  gather,  it  was  a 
friendly,  lively  exchange  of  ideas  (on  a  subject  or 
two  in  which  at  this  moment  we  all  appear  to  be  in 
finitely  interested)  among  several  persons  who  ev 
idently  considered  that  they  were  not  destitute  of 
matter.  The  reader  will  judge  if  they  were  justified 
in  this  arrogance.  The  occasion  was  perhaps  less 
remarkable  than  my  informant  deemed  it ;  still,  the 
reunion  of  half  a  dozen  people  with  ideas  at  a  lodg 
ing-house  in  Sackville  Street  on  a  foggy  November 
night  cannot  be  accounted  a  perfectly  trivial  fact. 
The  apartment  was  the  brilliant  Belinda's,  and  the 
day  before  she  had  asked  Camilla  and  Oswald  to 
dine  with  her.  After  this  she  had  invited  Clifford 
and  Darcy  to  meet  them.  Lastly,  that  afternoon, 
encountering  Belwood  in  a  shop  in  Piccadilly,  she 
had  begged  him  to  join  the  party.  The  "  ideas  " 
were  not  produced  in  striking  abundance,  as  I  sur 
mise,  till  the  company  had  passed  back  into  the  little 


268  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON  AND    ELSEWHERE 

sitting-room,  and  cigarettes,  after  the  coffee,  had  been 
permitted  by  the  ladies,  and  in  the  case  of  one  of 
them  (the  reader  must  guess  which)  perhaps  even 
more  actively  countenanced.  The  train  was  fired 
by  a  casual  question  from  the  artless  Camilla :  she 
asked  Darcy  if  he  could  recommend  her  a  nice  book 
to  read  on  the  journey  to  Paris.  Then  immediately 
the  colloquy  took  a  turn  which,  little  dramatic  though 
it  may  appear,  I  can  best  present  in  the  scenic  form  : 

Darcy.  My  dear  lady,  what  do  you  mean  by  a  nice 
book  ?  That's  so  vague. 

Belinda,  You  could  tell  her  definitely  enough,  if 
she  asked  for  a  n — for  one  that's  not  nice. 

Darcy.  How  do  you  mean — I  could  tell  her  ? 

Belinda.  There  are  so  many ;  and  in  this  cosmo 
politan  age  they  are  in  every  one's  hands. 

Camilla.  Really,  Belinda,  they  are  not  in  mine. 

Oswald.  My  wife,  though  she  lives  in  Paris,  doesn't 
read  French  books ;  she  reads  nothing  but  Tauch- 
nitz. 

Belinda.  She  has  to  do  that,  to  make  up  for  you — 
with  your  French  pictures. 

Camilla.  He  doesn't  paint  the  kind  you  mean ;  he 
paints  only  landscapes. 

Belinda.  That's  the  kind  I  mean. 

Oswald.  You  may  call  me  French  if  you  like,  but 
don't  call  me  cosmopolitan.  I'm  sick  of  that  word. 

Belwood.  You  may  call  me  so — I  like  it. 

Belinda.  Oh,  you  of  course — you're  an  analyst. 

Clifford.  Bless  me,  how  you're  abusing  us ! 


AN   ANIMATED    CONVERSATION  269 

Belinda.  Ah,  not  you — you  certainly  are  not  one. 

Darcy  (to  Clifford}.  You  don't  get  off  the  better. 
But  it's  as  you  take  it. 

Clifford.  A  plague  on  analysis  ! 

Darcy.  Yes,  that's  one  way.  Only,  you  make  me 
ashamed  of  my  question  to  Camilla — it's  so  refined. 

Camilla.  What,  then,  do  you  call  a  book  when  you 
like  it?  I  mean  a  nice,  pretty,  pleasant,  interesting 
book ;  rather  long,  so  as  not  to  be  over  quickly. 

Oswald.  It  never  is  with  you,  my  dear.  You  read 
a  page  a  day. 

Belwood.  I  should  like  to  write  something  for  Ca 
milla. 

Belinda.  To  make  her  read  faster  ? 

Camilla.  I  shouldn't  understand  it. 

Belinda.  Precisely — you'd  skip.  But  Darcy  never 
likes  anything — he's  a  critic. 

Darcy.  Only  of  books — not  of  people,  as  you  are. 

Belinda.  Oh,  I  like  people. 

Belwood.  They  give  it  back  ! 

Belinda.  I  mean  I  care  for  them  even  when  I  dorit 
like  them — it's  all  life. 

Darcy  (smiling}.  That's  just  what  I  often  think 
about  books. 

Belwood.  Ah,  yes,  life — life  ! 

Clifford.  Oh,  bother  life  !  Of  course  you  mean  a 
novel,  Camilla. 

Belinda.  What  else  can  a  woman  mean?  The 
book  to-day  is  the  novel. 

Oswald.  And  the  woman  is  the  public.  I'm  glad 
I  don't  write.  It's  bad  enough  to  paint. 


270  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

Belwood.  I  protest  against  that. 

Belinda.  Against  what  ? 

Belwood.  Against  everything.  The  woman  being 
the  public,  to  begin  with. 

Belinda.  It's  very  ungrateful  of  you.  Where  would 
you  be  without  them  ? 

Darcy.  Belwood  is  right,  in  this  sense  :  that  though 
they  are  very  welcome  as  readers,  it  is  fatal  to  write 
for  them. 

Belwood.  Who  writes  for  them  ?  One  writes  for 
one's  self. 

Belinda.  They  write  for  themselves. 

Darcy.  And  for  each  other. 

Oswald.  I  didn't  know  women  did  anything  for 
each  other. 

Darcy.  It  shows  how  little  you  read ;  for  if  they 
are,  as  you  say,  the  great  consumers  to-day,  they  are 
still  more  the  great  producers.  No  one  seems  to  no 
tice  it — but  no  one  notices  anything.  Literature  is 
simply  undergoing  a  transformation  —  it's  becoming 
feminine.  That's  a  portentous  fact. 

Oswald.  It's  very  dreadful. 

Belinda.  Take  care — we  shall  paint  yet. 

Oswald.  I've  no  doubt  you  will — it  will  be  fine ! 

Belwood.  It  will  contribute  in  its  degree  to  the 
great  evolution  which  as  yet  is  only  working  vaguely 
and  dumbly  in  the  depths  of  things,  but  which  is 
even  now  discernible,  by  partial,  imperfect  signs,  to 
the  intelligent,  and  which  will  certainly  become  the 
huge  "issue"  of  the  future,  belittling  and  swallowing 
up  all  our  paltry  present  strife,  our  armaments  and 


AN    ANIMATED    CONVERSATION  271 

wars,  our  international  hatreds,  and  even  our  inter 
national  Utopias,  our  political  muddles,  and  looming 
socialisms.  It  will  make  these  things  seem,  in  retro 
spect,  a  bed  of  roses. 

Belinda.  And  pray  what  is  it  ? 

Belwood.  The  essential,  latent  antagonism  of  the 
sexes — the  armed  opposed  array  of  men  and  women, 
founded  on  irreconcilable  interests.  Hitherto  we 
have  judged  these  interests  reconcilable,  and  even 
practically  identical.  But  all  that  is  changing  be 
cause  women  are  changing,  and  their  necessary  hos 
tility  to  men — or  that  of  men  to  them,  I  don't  care 
how  you  put  it — is  rising  by  an  inexorable  logic  to 
the  surface.  It  is  deeper — ah,  far  deeper,  than  our 
need  of  each  other,  deep  as  we  have  always  held 
that  to  be  ;  and  some  day  it  will  break  out  on  a 
scale  that  will  make  us  all  turn  pale. 

Belinda.  The  Armageddon  of  the  future,  quoi ! 

Camilla.  I  turn  pale  already ! 

Belinda.  I  don't — I  blush  for  his  folly. 

Darcy.  Excuse  the  timidity  of  my  imagination,  but 
it  seems  to  me  that  we  must  be  united. 

Belwood.  That's  where  it  is,  as  they  say.  We  shall 
be  united  by  hate. 

Belinda.  The  Kilkenny  cats,  quoi! 

Oswald.  Well,  we  shall  have  the  best  of  it — we  can 
thrash  them. 

Belwood.  I  am  not  so  sure ;  for  if  it's  a  question  of 
the  power  of  the  parties  to  hurt  each  other,  that  of 
the  sex  to  which  these  ladies  belong  is  immense. 

Camilla.  Why,  Belwood,  I  wouldn't  hurt  you  for 
the  world. 


272  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON    AND    ELSEWHERE 

Belinda.  I  would,  but  I  don't  want  to  wait  a  thou 
sand  years. 

Belwood.  I'm  sorry,  but  you'll  have  to.  Mean 
while  we  shall  be  comfortable  enough,  with  such 
women  as  Camilla. 

Belinda.  Thank  you — for  her. 

Belwood.  And  as  it  won't  be  for  a  thousand  years, 
I  may  say  that  Darcy's  account  of  the  actual  trans 
formation  of  literature  is  based  on  rather  a  partial, 
local  view.  It  isn't  at  all  true  of  France. 

Darcy.  Oh,  France !  France  is  sometimes  tire 
some  ;  she  contradicts  all  one's  generalizations. 

Belinda.  Dame,  she  contradicts  her  own  ! 

Belwood.  They're  so  clever,  the  French ;  they've 
arranged  everything,  in  their  system,  so  much  more 
comfortably  than  we.  They  haven't  to  bother  about 
women's  work ;  that  sort  of  thing  doesn't  exist  for 
them,  and  they  are  not  flooded  with  the  old  maids' 
novels  which  (a  cynic  or  a  purist  would  say)  make 
English  literature  ridiculous. 

Darcy.  No,  they  have  no  Miss  Austen. 

Belinda.  And  what  do  you  do  with  George  Sand  ? 

Belwood.  Do  you  call  her  an  old  maid  ? 

Belinda.  She  was  a  woman ;  we  are  speaking  of 
that. 

Belwood.  Not  a  bit — she  was  only  a  motherly  man. 

Clifford.  For  Heaven's  sake,  and  with  all  respect 
to  Belwood,  don't  let  us  be  cosmopolitan  !  Our  prej 
udices  are  our  responsibilities,  and  I  hate  to  see  a 
fine,  big,  healthy  one  dying  of  neglect,  when  it  might 
grow  up  to  support  a  family. 


AN   ANIMATED   CONVERSATION  273 

Belwood.  Ah,  they  don't  support  families  now ;  it's 
as  much  as  they  can  do  to  scrape  along  for  them 
selves. 

Clifford.  If  you  weren't  a  pessimist  I  should  nearly 
become  one.  Our  literature  is  good  enough  for  us, 
and  I  don't  at  all  complain  of  the  ladies.  They 
write  jolly  good  novels  sometimes,  and  I  don't  see 
why  they  shouldn't. 

Oswald.  It's  true  they  play  lawn-tennis. 

Belwood.  So  they  do,  and  that's  more  difficult. 
I'm  perfectly  willing  to  be  English. 

Belinda.  Or  American. 

Belwood.  Take  care — that's  cosmopolitan. 

Belinda.  For  you,  yes,  but  not  for  me. 

Belwood.  Yes,  see  what  a  muddle — with  Clifford's 
simplifications.  That's  another  thing  the  French 
have  been  clever  enough  to  keep  out  of :  the  great 
silly  schism  of  language,  of  usage,  of  literature. 
They  have  none  of  those  clumsy  questions — Amer 
ican  -  English  and  English  -  American.  French  is 
French,  and  that's  the  end  of  it. 

Clifford.  And  English  is  English. 

Belinda.  And  American's  American. 

Belwood.  Perhaps  ;  but  that's  not  the  end  of  it,  it's 
the  very  beginning.  And  the  beginning  of  such  a 
weariness  ! 

Darcy.  A  weariness  only  if  our  frivolity  makes  it 
so.  It  is  true  our  frivolity  is  capable  of  anything. 

Clifford.  Oh,  I  like  our  frivolity  ! 

Darcy.  So  it  would  seem,  if  you  fail  to  perceive  that 
our  insistence  on  international  differences  is  stupid. 
18 


274  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

Clifford,  I'm  not  bound  to  perceive  anything  so 
metaphysical.  The  American  papers  are  awfully 
funny.  Why  shouldn't  one  say  so  ?  I  don't  insist — 
I  never  insisted  on  anything  in  my  life. 

Oswald.  We  are  awfully  different,  say  what  you 
will. 

Darcy.  Rubbish — rubbish — rubbish  ! 

Oswald.  Go  to  Paris  and  you'll  see. 

Clifford.  Oh,  don't  go  to  Paris  again  ! 

Darcy.  What  has  Paris  to  do  with  it  ? 

Belwood.  We  must  be  large — we  must  be  rich. 

Oswald.  All  the  American  painters  are  there.  Go 
and  see  what  they  are  doing,  what  they  hold  paint 
ing  to  be ;  and  then  come  and  look  at  the  English 
idea. 

Belinda.  Do  you  call  it  an  idea  ? 

Darcy.  You  ought  to  be  fined,  and  I  think  I  shall 
propose  the  establishment  of  a  system  of  fines,  for 
the  common  benefit  of  the  two  peoples  and  the  dis 
couragement  of  aggravation. 

Belinda.  Dear  friend,  can't  one  breathe  ?  W7ho 
does  more  for  the  two  peoples  than  T,  and  for  the 
practical  solution  of  their  little  squabbles?  Their 
squabbles  are  purely  theoretic,  and  the  solution  is 
real,  being  simply  that  of  personal  intercourse.  While 
we  talk,  and  however  we  talk,  association  is  cunning 
ly,  insidiously  doing  its  indestructible  work.  It  works 
while  we're  asleep  —  more  than  we  can  undo  while 
we're  awake.  It  is  wiser  than  we  —  it  has  a  deeper 
motive.  And  what  could  be  a  better  proof  of  what  I 
say  than  the  present  occasion?  All  our  intercourse 


AN    ANIMATED    CONVERSATION  275 

is  a  perpetual  conference,  and  this  is  one  of  its  sit 
tings.  They're  informal,  casual,  humorous,  but  none 
the  less  useful,  because  they  are  full  of  an  irrepress 
ible  give-and-take.  What  other  nations  are  contin 
ually  meeting  to  talk  over  the  reasons  why  they 
shouldn't  meet  ?  What  others  are  so  sociably  sepa 
rate —  so  intertwinedly,  cohesively  alien?  We  talk 
each  other  to  sleep ;  it's  becoming  insipid — that's  the 
only  drawback.  Am  I  not  always  coming  and  going, 
so  that  I  have  lost  all  sense  of  where  I  "  belong  "  ? 
And  aren't  we,  in  this  room,  such  a  mixture  that  we 
scarcely,  ourselves,  know  who  is  who  and  what  is 
what?  Clifford  utters  an  inarticulate  and  ambiguous 
sound,  but  I  rejoice  in  the  confusion,  for  it  makes  for 
civilization. 

Belwood.  All  honor  to  Belinda,  mistress  of  hos 
pitality  and  of  irony ! 

Clifford.  Your  party  is  jolly,  but  I  didn't  know  it 
was  so  improving.  Don't  let  us  at  any  rate  be  insipid. 

Belinda.  We  shall  not,  while  you're  here  —  even 
though  you  have  no  general  ideas. 

Belwood.  Belinda  has  an  extraordinary  number, 
for  a  woman. 

Belinda.  Perhaps  I  am  only  a  motherly  man. 

Oswald.  Sisterly,  rather.  Talk  of  \\\z  fraternite  of 
the  French !  But  I  feel  rather  out  of  it,  in  Paris. 

Belinda.  You're  not  in  Paris  —  you're  just  here. 

Camilla.  But  we  are  going  to  -  morrow,  and  no  one 
has  yet  told  me  a  book  for  the  train. 

Clifford.  Get  "  The  Rival  Bridesmaids  ";  it's  a  tre 
mendous  lark.  And  I  am  large,  I  am  rich,  as  Bel- 


276  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

wood  says,  in  recommending  it,  because  it's  about 
New  York  —  one  of  your  "society -novels,"  full  of 
"snap"!  And  by  a  woman,  I  guess;  though  it 
strikes  me  that  with  American  novels  you  can't  be 
very  sure. 

Camilla.  The  women  write  like  men  ? 

Clifford.  Or  the  men  write  like  women. 

Camilla.  Then  I  expect  (if  you  like  that  better) 
that  it's  horrid,  one  of  those  American  productions 
that  are  never  heard  of  la-bas  and  yet  find  themselves 
circulating  in  England. 

Clifford.  I  see  — the  confusion  commended  by  Be 
linda.  It's  very  dense. 

Camilla.  Besides,  whoever  it  was  that  said  a  book 
is  as  a  matter  of  course  a  novel,  it  wasn't  I. 

Belwood.  As  no  one  seems  prepared  to  father  that 
terrible  proposition,  I  will  just  remark,  in  relation  to 
the  matter  we  are  talking  about — 

Oswald.  Lord,  which?  We  are  talking  of  so 
many! 

Belwood.  You  will  understand  when  I  say  that  an 
acuteness  of  national  sentiment  on  the  part  of  my 
nation  and  yours  (as  against  each  other,  of  course,  I 
mean)  is  more  and  more  an  artificial  thing — a  matter 
of  perverted  effort  and  deluded  duty.  It  is  kept  up 
by  the  newspapers,  which  must  make  a  noise  at  any 
price,  and  whose  huge,  clumsy  machinery  (it  exists 
only  for  that)  is  essentially  blundering.  They  are 
incapable  of  the  notation  of  private  delicacies,  in 
spite  of  the  droll  assumption  of  so  many  sheets  that 
private  life  is  their  domain ;  and  they  keep  striking 


AN    ANIMATED    CONVERSATION  277 

the  wrong  hour  with  a  complacency  which  misleads 
the  vulgar.  Unfortunately  the  vulgar  are  many. 
All  the  more  reason  why  the  children  of  light  should 
see  clear. 

Darcy.  Ah,  those  things  are  an  education  which  I 
think  even  the  French  might  envy  us. 

Oswald.  What  things  ? 

Darcy.  The  recriminations,  the  little  digs,  what 
ever  you  choose  to  call  them,  between  America  and 
England. 

Oswald.  I  thought  you  just  said  they  were  rubbish. 

Darcy.  It's  the  perception  that  they  are  rubbish 
that  constitutes  the  education. 

Oswald.  I  see  —  you're  educated.  I'm  afraid  I'm 
not. 

Clifford.  And  I,  too,  perceive  how  much  I  have  to 
learn. 

Belinda.  You  are  both  naughty  little  boys  who 
won't  go  to  school. 

Darcy.  An  education  of  the  intelligence,  of  the  tem 
per,  of  the  manners. 

Clifford.  Do  you  think  your  manners  to  us  show 
so  much  training  ? 

Oswald  (to  Clifford').  They  are  perhaps  on  the 
whole  as  finished  as  yours  to  us .' 

Belinda.  A  fine,  a  fine  to  each  of  you  ! 

Darcy.  Quite  right,  and  Belinda  shall  impose  them. 
I  don't  say  we  are  all  formed  —  the  formation  will 
have  to  be  so  large :  I  see  it  as  majestic,  as  magnif 
icent.  But  we  are  forming.  The  opportunity  is  grand, 
there  has  never  been  anything  like  it  in  the  wrorld. 


278  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON    AND    ELSEWHERE 

Oswald.  I'm  not  sure  I  follow  you. 

Darcy.  Why,  the  opportunity  for  two  great  peoples 
to  accept,  or  rather  to  cultivate  with  talent,  a  com 
mon  destiny,  to  tackle  the  world  together,  to  unite  irr 
the  arts  of  peace — by  which  I  mean  of  course  in  the 
arts  of  life.  It  will  make  life  larger  and  the  arts  finer 
for  each  of  them.  It  will  be  an  immense  and  compli 
cated  problem  of  course  —  to  see  it  through ;  but 
that's  why  I  speak  of  it  as  an  object  of  envy  to  other 
nations,  in  its  discipline,  its  suggestiveness,  the  initia 
tion,  the  revelation  it  will  lead  to.  Their  problems, 
in  comparison,  strike  me  as  small  and  vulgar.  It's 
not  true  that  there  is  nothing  new  under  the  sun ;  the 
donn'ee  of  the  drama  that  England  and  America  may 
act  out  together  is  absolutely  new.  Essentially  new 
is  the  position  in  which  they  stand  towards  each  other. 
It  rests  with  all  of  us  to  make  it  newer  still. 

Clifford.  I  hope  there  will  be  a  scene  in  the  comedy 
for  international  copyright. 

Darcy.  A-ah ! 

Belinda.  O-oh ! 

Belwood.  I  say  ! 

Darcy.  That  will  come  —  very  soon :  to  a  positive 
certainty. 

Clifford.  What  do  you  call  very  soon?  You  seem 
to  be  talking  for  the  ages. 

Belwood.  It's  time  —  yes,  it's  time  now,  I  can  un 
derstand  that  hitherto — 

Clifford.  I  can't ! 

Darcy.  I'm  not  sure  whether  I  can  or  not.  I'm 
trying  what  I  can  understand.  But  it's  all  in  the 
day's  work — we  are  learning. 


AN   ANIMATED   CONVERSATION  279 

Clifford.  Learning  at  our  expense!  That's  very 
nice.  I  observe  that  Oswald  is  silent;  as  an  example 
of  good  manners  he  ought  to  defend  the  case. 

Belinda.  He's  thinking  of  what  he  can  say,  and  so 
am  I. 

Camilla.  Let  me  assist  my  husband.  How  did 
Clifford  come  by  "  The  Rival  Bridesmaids  "  ?  Wasn't 
it  a  pirated  copy  ? 

Clifford.  Do  you  call  that  assisting  him  ?  I  don't 
know  whether  it  was  or  not,  and  at  all  events  it 
needn't  have  been.  Very  likely  the  author  lives  in 
England. 

Camilla.  In  England  ? 

Clifford.  Round  the  corner,  quoi,  as  Belinda  says. 

Oswald.  We  have  had  to  have  cheap  books,  we 
have  always  been  hard-working,  grinding,  bread-earn 
ing  readers. 

Clifford.  Bravo  —  at  last !  You  might  have  had 
them  as  cheap  as  you  liked.  What  you  mean  is  you 
wanted  them  for  nothing.  Ah,  yes,  you're  so  poor ! 

Belwood.  Well,  it  has  made  you,  your  half-century 
of  books  for  nothing,  a  magnificent  public  for  us  now. 
We  appreciate  that. 

Belinda.  Magnanimous  Belwood  !  Thank  you  for 
that. 

Darcy.  The  better  day  is  so  surely  coming  that  I 
was  simply  taking  it  for  granted. 

Clifford.  Wait  till  it  comes  and  then  we'll  start  fair. 

Belinda.  Yes,  we  really  can't  talk  till  it  does. 

Darcy.  On  the  contrary,  talking  will  help  it  to 
come. 


280  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON    AND    ELSEWHERE 

Belinda.  If  it  doesn't  come,  and  very  soon  —  to 
morrow,  next  week — our  mouths  will  be  shut  forever. 

Darcy.  Ah,  don't  be  horrible  ! 

Clifford.  Yes,  you  won't  like  that. 

Oswald.    You  will ;  so  it's  perhaps  your  interest. 

Darcy,  I  don't  mean  our  shut  mouths  —  I  mean 
the  reason  for  them. 

Belinda  (to  Oswald}.  You  remind  me  that  you  and 
Clifford  are  fined.  But  I  think  it  must  only  be  a 
farthing  for  Clifford. 

Clifford.  I  won't  pay  even  that.  I  speak  but  the 
truth,  and  under  the  circumstances  I  think  I'm  very 
civil. 

Oswald.  Don't  give  up  your  grievance  —  it  will  be 
worth  everything  to  you. 

Belinda.    You're  fined  five  dollars  ! 

Darcy.  If  copyright  doesn't  come,  I'll — (hesitat 
ing). 

Clifford  (waiting).  What  will  you  do  ? 

Darcy,  I'll  get  me  to  a  nunnery. 

Clifford.  Much  good  will  that  do  ! 

Darcy.  My  nunnery  shall  be  in  the  United  States, 
and  I  shall  found  there  a  library  of  English  novels  in 
the  original  three  volumes. 

Belinda.  I  shall  do  very  differently.  I  shall  come 
out  of  my  cell  like  Peter  the  Hermit ;  I  shall  cry 
aloud  for  a  crusade. 

Clifford.  Your  comparison  doesn't  hold,  for  you 
are  yourself  an  infidel. 

Belinda.  A  fig  for  that !  I  shall  fight  under  the 
cross. 


AN    ANIMATED    CONVERSATION  281 

Belwood.  There's  a  great  army  over  there  now. 

Clifford.  I  hope  they'll  win  ! 

Belwood.  If  they  don't,  you  Americans  must  make 
a  great  literature,  such  as  we  shall  read  with  delight, 
pour  it  out  on  us  unconditionally,  and  pay  us  back 
that  way. 

Clifford.  I  shall  not  object  to  that  arrangement  if 
we  do  read  with  delight ! 

Belwood.  Ah,  that  will  depend  partly  also  on  us. 

Darcy.  Delicate  Belwood  !  If  what  we  do  becomes 
great,  you  will  probably  understand  it — at  least  I 
hope  so  !  But  I  like  the  way  you  talk  about  great 
literatures.  Does  it  strike  you  that  they  are  breaking 
out  about  the  world  that  way  ? 

Clifford.  Send  us  over  some  good  novels  for  noth 
ing,  and  we'll  call  it  square. 

Belwood.  I  admit,  our  preoccupations,  everywhere 
— those  of  the  race  in  general  —  don't  seem  to  make 
for  literature. 

Clifford.  Then  we  English  shall  never  be  repaid, 

Oswald.  Are  the  works  you  give  to  America  then 
so  literary  ? 

Clifford.  We  give  everything  —  we  have  given  all 
the  great  people. 

Oswald.  Ah,  the  great  people — if  you  mean  those 
of  the  past  —  were  not  yours  to  give.  They  were 
ours  too  ;  you  pay  no  more  for  them  than  we. 

Clifford.  It  depends  upon  what  you  mean  by  the 
past. 

Darcy.  I  don't  think  it's  particularly  in  our  inter 
est  to  go  into  the  chronology  of  the  matter.  We 


282  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND   ELSEWHERE 

pirated  Byron — we  pirated  Scott.  Nor  does  it  profit 
to  differ  about  which  were  the  great  ones.  They 
were  all  great  enough  for  us  to  take,  and  we  took 
them.  We  take  them  to-day,  however  the  superior 
may  estimate  them  ^  and  we  should  take  them  still, 
even  if  the  superior  were  to  make  more  reservations. 
It  has  been  our  misfortune  (in  the  long  run,  I  mean) 
that  years  and  years  ago,  when  the  taking  began,  it 
was,  intelligently  viewed,  quite  inevitable.  We  were 
poor  then,  and  we  were  hungry  and  lonely  and  far 
away,  and  we  had  to  have  something  to  read.  We 
helped  ourselves  to  the  literature  that  was  nearest, 
which  was  all  the  more  attractive  that  it  had  about 
it,  in  its  native  form,  such  a  fine  glamour  of  ex 
pense,  of  the  guinea  volume  and  the  wide  margin. 
It  was  aristocratic,  and  a  civilization  can't  make  itself 
without  that.  If  it  isn't  the  bricks,  it's  the  mortar. 
The  first  thing  a  society  does  after  it  has  left  the 
aristocratic  out  is  to  put  it  in  again :  of  course,  I  use 
the  word  in  a  loose  way.  We  couldn't  pay  a  fancy 
price  for  that  element,  and  we  only  paid  what  we 
could.  The  booksellers  made  money,  and  the  pub 
lic  only  asked  if  there  wasn't  more  —  it  asked  no 
other  questions.  You  can  treat  books  as  a  luxury, 
and  authors  with  delicacy,  only  if  you've  already  got 
a  lot :  you  can't  start  on  that  basis. 

Clifford.  But  I  thought  your  claim  is  precisely  that 
you  had  a  lot — all  our  old  writers. 

Darcy.  The  old  writers,  yes.  But  the  old  writers, 
uncontemporary  and  more  or  less  archaic,  were  a 
little  grim.  We  were  so  new  ourselves,  and  our  very 


AN    ANIMATED    CONVERSATION  283 

newness  was  in  itself  sufficiently  grim.  The  English 
books  of  the  day  (their  charm  was  that  they  were  of 
the  day)  were  our  society  —  we  had  very  little  other. 
We  were  happy  to  pay  the  servant  for  opening  the 
door — the  bookseller  for  republishing;  but  I  dare  say 
that  even  if  we  had  thought  of  it  we  should  have 
had  a  certain  hesitation  in  feeing  the  visitors.  A 
money-question  when  they  were  so  polite !  It  was 
too  kind  of  them  to  come. 

Clifford.  I  don't  quite  recognize  the  picture  of 
your  national  humility,  at  any  stage  of  your  existence. 
Even  if  you  had  thought  of  it,  you  say  ?  It  didn't 
depend  upon  that.  We  began  to  remind  you  long 
ago — ever  so  long  ago. 

Darcy.  Yes,  you  were  fairly  prompt.  But  our 
curse,  in  the  disguise  of  a  blessing,  was  that  mean 
while  we  had  begun  to  regard  your  company  as  a 
matter  of  course.  Certainly,'  that  should  have  been 
but  a  detail  when  reflection  and  responsibility  had 
come.  At  what  particular  period  was  it  to  have  been 
expected  of  our  conscience  to  awake  ? 

Clifford.  If  it  was  last  year  it's  enough. 

Darcy.  Oh,  it  was  long  ago — very  long  ago,  as  you 
say.  I  assign  an  early  date.  But  you  can't  put  your 
finger  on  the  place. 

Clifford.  On  your  conscience  ? 

Darcy.  On  the  period.  Our  conscience— to  speak 
of  that — has  the  defect  of  not  being  homogeneous. 
It's  very  big. 

Clifford.  You  mean  it's  elastic  ? 

Darcy.  On  the  contrary,  it's  rigid,  in  places  ;  it's 


284  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

numb ;  it's  not  animated  to  the  extremities.  A  con 
science  is  a  natural  organ,  but  if  it's  to  be  of  any  use 
in  the  complications  of  life  it  must  also  be  a  culti 
vated  one.  Ours  is  cultivated,  highly  cultivated,  in 
spots ;  but  there  are  large,  crude  patches. 

Clifford,  I  see — an  occasional  oasis  in  the  desert. 

Darcy.  No  —  blooming  farms  in  the  prairie.  The 
prairie  is  rich,  but  it's  not  all  settled;  there  are 
promising  barbarous  tracts.  Therefore  the  different 
parts  of  the  organ  to  which  I  have  likened  it  don't, 
just  as  yet,  all  act  together.  But  when  they  do — 

Clifford.  When  they  do  we  shall  all  be  dead  of 
starvation. 

Belinda.  I'll  divide  my  own  pittance  with  you 
first. 

Camilla.  I'm  glad  we  live  in  Paris.  In  Paris  they 
don't  mind. 

Darcy.  They  mind  something  else. 

Oswald  (bracing  himself).  He  means  the  invidious 
duty  the  American  government  has  levied  on  foreign 
works  of  art.  In  intention  it's  prohibitive  —  they 
won't  admit  free  any  but  American  productions. 

Belwood.  That's  a  fine  sort  of  thing  for  the  culture 
of  a  people. 

Clifford.  It  keeps  out  monarchical  pictures. 

Belinda  (to  Oswald}.  Why  did  you  tell  —  before 
two  Englishmen? 

Camilla.  I  never  even  heard  of  it — in  Paris. 

Belwood.  Ah,  there  they  are  too  polite  to  reproach 
you  with  it. 

Oswald.  It  doesn't  keep  out  anything,  for  in  fact 


AN    ANIMATED    CONVERSATION  285 

the  duty,  though  high,  isn't  at  all  prohibitive.  If  it 
were  effective  it  would  be  effective  almost  altogether 
against  the  French,  whose  pictures  are  not  monarch 
ical,  but  as  republican  as  our  own,  so  that  Clifford's 
taunt  is  wasted.  The  people  over  there  who  buy 
foreign  works  of  art  are  very  rich,  and  they  buy  them 
just  the  same,  duty  and  all. 

Darcy.  Doesn't  what  you  say  indicate  that  the  tax 
restricts  that  ennobling  pleasure  to  the  very  rich  ? 
Without  it  amateurs  of  moderate  fortune  might  pick 
up  some  bits. 

Oswald.  Good  pictures  are  rarely  cheap.  When 
they  are  dear  only  the  rich  can  buy  them.  In  the 
few  cases  where  they  are  cheap  the  tax  doesn't  make 
them  dear. 

Belinda.  Bravo— I'm  reassured  ! 

Darcy.  It  doesn't  invalidate  the  fact  that  French 
artists  have  spoken  of  the  matter  to  me  with  passion 
and  scorn,  and  that  I  have  hung  my  head  and  had 
nothing  to  say. 

Belinda.  Oh,  Darcy  —  how  can  you?  Wait  till 
they  go  ! 

Clifford.  Hadn't  we  better  go  now  ? 

Belinda.  Dear  me,  no  —  not  on  that  note.  Wait 
till  we  work  round. 

Clifford.  What  can  you  work  round  to  ? 

Camilla.  Why,  to  the  novel.  I  insist  on  being  told 
of  a  good  one. 

Oswald.  The  foreigners  were  frightened  at  first, 
but  things  have  turned  out  much  better  than  they 
feared. 


286  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

Belinda.  We're  working  round  ! 

Oswald.  Otherwise  do  you  think  I  could  bear  to 
stay  in  Paris  ? 

Darcy.  That  makes  me  wince,  as  I  have  the  face 
to  stay  in  London. 

Oswald.  Oh,  English  pictures — ! 

Darcy.  I'm  not  thinking  of  English  pictures  ; 
though  I  might,  for  some  of  them  are  charming. 

Belwood.  What  will  you  have  ?  It's  all  protec 
tion. 

Darcy.  We  protect  the  industry  and  demolish  the 
art. 

Oswald.  I  thought  you  said  you  were  not  thinking 
of  the  art. 

Darcy.  Dear  Oswald,  there  are  more  than  one. 
The  art  of  letters. 

Oswald.  Where  do  you  find  it  to-day — the  art  of 
letters  ?  It  seems  to  me  to  be  the  industry,  all  round 
and  everywhere. 

Clifford  (to  Belwood}.  They  squabble  among  them 
selves — that  may  be  good  for  us! 

Darcy.  Don't  say  squabble,  say  discuss.  Of 
course  we  discuss ;  but  from  the  moment  we  do  so 
vous  en  $tes,  indefeasibly.  There  is  no  such  thing  as 
"  themselves,"  on  either  side  ;  it's  all  0#rselves.  The 
fact  of  discussion  welds  us  together,  and  we  have 
properties  in  common  that  we  can't  get  rid  of. 

Oswald.  My  dear  Darcy,  you're  fantastic. 

Clifford.  You  do  squabble,  you  do  ! 

Darcy.  Call  it  so,  then  :  don't  you  see  how  you're 
in  it? 


AN   ANIMATED    CONVERSATION  287 

Belwood.  I  see  very  well — I  feel  it  all. 

Clifford.  I  don't  then — hanged  if  I'm  in  it ! 

Camilla.  Now  they  are  squabbling  ! 

Belwood.  Our  conversation  certainly  supports  Be 
linda's  contention  that  we  are  in  indissoluble  contact. 
Our  interchange  of  remarks  just  now  about  copyright 
was  a  signal  proof  of  union. 

Clifford.  It  was  humiliating  for  these  dear  Amer 
icans — if  you  call  that  union  ! 

Belwood.  Clifford,  I'm  ashamed  of  you. 

Camilla.  They  are  squabbling — they  are  ! 

Belinda.  Yes,  but  we  don't  gain  by  it.  I  am 
humiliated,  and  Darcy  was  pulled  up  short. 

Clifford.  You're  in  a  false  position,  quoi!  You 
see  how  intolerable  that  is.  You  feel  it  in  every 
thing. 

Belinda.  Yes,  it's  a  loss  of  freedom — the  greatest 
form  of  suffering.  A  chill  has  descended  upon  me, 
and  I'm  not  sure  I  can  shake  it  off.  I  don't  want 
this  delightful  party  to  break  up,  yet  I  feel  as  if  we 
— I  mean  we  four — had  nothing  more  to  say. 

Oswald.  We  have  all  in  fact  chattered  enough. 

Camilla.  Oh,  be  cheerful  and  talk  about  the  novel. 

Clifford.  Innocent  Camilla — as  if  the  novel  to-day 
were  cheerful ! 

Belinda.  I  see  Darcy  has  more  assurance. 

Belwood.  You  mean  he  has  more  ideas. 

Darcy.  It  is  because  dear  Belwood  is  here.  If  I 
were  alone  with  Clifford  I  dare  say  I  should  be  rather 
low.  But  I  have  more  to  say,  inconsequent,  and  per 
haps  even  indecent,  as  that  may  be.  I  have  it  at 


288  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND   ELSEWHERE 

heart  to  say  that  the  things  that  divide  us  appear  to 
me,  when  they  are  enumerated  by  the  people  who 
profess  to  be  acutely  conscious  of  them,  ineffably 
small. 

Clifford.  Small  for  you  ! 

Belinda.  Clifford,  if  you  are  impertinent  I  shall 
rise  from  my  ashes.  Darcy  is  so  charming. 

Oswald.  He's  so  ingenious. 

Belwood.  Continue  to  be  charming,  Darcy.  That's 
the  spell ! 

Darcy.  I'm  not  ingenious  at  all ;  I'm  only  a  God 
fearing,  plain  man,  saying  things  as  they  strike  him. 

Camilla.  You  are  charming. 

Darcy.  Well,  it  doesn't  prevent  me  from  having 
noticed  the  other  day,  in  a  magazine,  in  a  recrimina 
tory,  a  retaliatory  (I  don't  know  what  to  call  it)  arti 
cle,  a  phrase  to  the  effect  that  the  author,  an  Amer 
ican,  would  frankly  confess,  and  take  his  stand  on  it, 
that  he  liked  rocking-chairs,  Winchester  rifles,  and 
iced  water.  He  seemed  a  very  bristling  gentleman, 
and  they  apparently  were  his  ultimatum.  It  made 
me  reflect  on  these  symbols  of  our  separateness, 
and  I  wanted  to  put  the  article  into  the  fire  before 
a  Frenchman  or  a  German  should  see  it. 

Clifford.  Iced  water,  rocking-chairs,  and  copyright. 

Darcy.  Well,  add  copyright  after  all ! 

Belinda.  Darcy  is  irrepressible. 

Darcy.  It  wouldn't  make  the  spectacle  sensibly 
less  puerile,  or  I  may  say  less  grotesque,  for  a 
Frenchman  or  a  German.  They  are  not  quarrel 
ling  about  copyright — or  even  about  rocking-chairs. 


AN    ANIMATED    CONVERSATION  289 

Clifford.  Or  even  about  fisheries,  or  even  about 
the  public  manners  engendered  by  presidential  elec 
tions. 

Oswald  (to  Darcy}.  Don't  you  know  your  country- 
people  well  enough  to  know  just  how  much  they  care, 
by  which  I  mean  how  little,  for  what  a  Frenchman  or 
a  German  may  think  of  them  ? 

Clifford.  And  don't  you  know  mine? 

Oswald.  Or  an  Englishman  ? 

Clifford.  Or  an  American  ? 

Darcy.  Oh,  every  country  cares,  much  more  in 
practice  than  in  theory.  The  form  of  national  sus 
ceptibility  differs  with  different  peoples,  but  the  sub 
stance  is  very  much  the  same. 

Bdwood.  I  am  appalled,  when  I  look  at  the  prin 
cipal  nations  of  the  globe,  at  the  vivacity  of  their 
mutual  hatreds,  as  revealed  by  the  bright  light  of  the 
latter  end  of  the  nineteenth  century.  We  are  very 
proud  of  that  light,  but  that's  what  it  principally 
shows  us.  Look  at  the  European  family — it's  a  per 
fect  menagerie  of  pet  aversions.  And  some  coun 
tries  resemble  fat  old  ladies  —  they  have  so  many 
pets.  It  is  certainly  worse  than  it  used  to  be  ;  of 
old  we  didn't  exchange  compliments  every  day. 

Darcy.  It  is  only  worse  in  this  sense,  that  we  see 
more  of  each  other  now,  we  touch  each  other  infi 
nitely  more. 

Behvood.  Our  acrimonies  are  a  pleasant  result  of 
that. 

Darcy.  They  are  not  a  final  one.  We  must  get 
used  to  each  other.  It's  a  rough  process,  if  you  like, 
19 


290  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

but  there  are  worse  discomforts.  Our  modern  inti 
macy  is  a  very  new  thing,  it  has  brought  us  face  to 
face,  and  in  this  way  the  question  comes  up  for  each 
party  of  whether  it  likes,  whether  it  can  live  with  the 
other.  The  question  is  practical,  it's  social  now ;  be 
fore  it  was  academic  and  official.  Newspapers,  tele 
graphs,  trains,  fast  steamers,  all  the  electricities  and 
publicities  that  are  playing  over  us  like  a  perpetual 
thunder-storm,  have  made  us  live  in  a  common  me 
dium,  which  is  far  from  being  a  non-conductor.  The 
world  has  become  a  big  hotel,  the  Grand  Hotel  of 
the  Nations,  and  we  meet — I  mean  the  nations  meet 
— on  the  stairs  and  at  the  table  d'h&te.  You  know  the 
faces  at  the  table  d'hbte,  one  is  never  enthusiastic 
about  them ;  they  give  on  one's  nerves.  All  the 
same,  their  wearers  fall  into  conversation,  and  often 
find  each  other  quite  nice.  We  are  in  the  first  stage, 
looking  at  each  other,  glaring  at  each  other,  if  you 
will,  while  the  entree  goes  round.  We  play  the  piano, 
we  smoke,  we  chatter  in  our  rooms,  and  the  sound 
and  the  fumes  go  through.  But  we  won't  pull  down 
the  house,  because  by  to-morrow  we  shall  have  found 
our  big  polyglot  inn,  with  its  German  waiters,  rather 
amusing. 

Belinda.  Call  them  Jews  as  well  as  Germans.  The 
landlord  is  German,  too. 

Oswald,  What  a  horrible  picture  !  I  don't  accept 
it  for  America  and  England ;  I  think  those  parties 
have  each  a  very  good  house  of  their  own. 

Darcy.  From  the  moment  you  resent,  on  our  be 
half,  the  vulgarity  of  the  idea  of  hotel-life,  see  what 


AN    ANIMATED    CONVERSATION  29 1 

a  superior  situation,  apart  in  our  duality  and  distin 
guished,  you  by  that  very  fact  conceive  for  us.  Bel- 
wood's  image  is,  to  my  sense,  graceful  enough,  even 
though  it  may  halt  a  little.  The  fisheries,  and  all  the 
rest,  are  simply  the  piano  in  the  next  room.  It  may  be 
played  at  the  wrong  hour,  but  that  isn't  a  casus  belli; 
we  can  thump  on  the  wall,  we  can  rattle  the  door,  we 
can  arrange.  And  for  that  matter,  surely  it  is  not 
to  be  desired  that  all  questions  between  us  should 
cease.  There  must  be  enough  to  be  amusing,  que 
diable !  As  Belinda  said,  it's  already  becoming  in 
sipid. 

Clifford.  Perhaps  we  had  better  keep  the  copyright 
matter  open  for  the  fun  of  it.  It's  remarkable  fun 
for  us. 

Oswald.  It's  fun  for  you  that  our  tongues  are 
tied,  as  Belinda  and  Darcy  declare. 

Clifford.  Are  they  indeed  ?     I  haven't  perceived  it. 

Belinda.  Every  one  on  our  side,  I  admit,  has  not 
Darcy's  delicacy. 

Darcy.  Nor  Belinda's. 

Oswald.  Yet  I  think  of  innumerable  things  we 
don't  say — that  we  might ! 

Clifford.  You  mean  that  you  yourself  might.  If 
you  think  of  them,  pray  say  them. 

Oswald.  Oh,  no,  my  tongue  is  tied. 

Clifford.  Come,  I'll  let  you  off. 

Oswald.  It's  very  good  of  you,  but  there  are  oth 
ers  who  wouldn't. 

Clifford.  How  would  "  others "  know  ?  Would 
your  remarks  have  such  a  reverberation  ? 


2Q2  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

Belinda.  I  won't  let  him  off,  and  please  remem 
ber  that  this  is  my  house. 

Clifford.  It's  doubtless  a  great  escape  for  me. 

Oswald.  You  are  all  escaping  all  the  while,  under 
cover  of  your  grievance.  There  would  be  a  great 
deal  to  be 'said  for  the  policy  of  your  not  letting  it 
go.  The  advantage  of  it  may  be  greater  than  the 
injury.  If  we  pay  you  we  can  criticise  you. 

Clifford.  Why,  on  the  contrary,  it's  that  that  will 
be  an  advantage  for  us.  Fancy,  immense ! 

Oswald.  Oh,  you  won't  like  it ! 

Clifford.  Will  it  be  droller  than  it  is  already  ?  We 
shall  delight  in  it. 

Belwood.  Oh,  there  are  many  things  to  say ! 

Darcy.  Detached  Belwood ! 

Belwood.  Attached,  on  the  contrary.  Attached  to 
everything  we  have  in  common. 

Darcy.  Delightful  Belwood ! 

Belwood.  Delightful  Darcy! 

Belinda  (to  Clifford}.  That's  the  way  you  and  Os 
wald  should  be. 

Clifford.  It  makes  me  rather  sick,  and  I  think, 
from  the  expression  of  Oswald's  face,  that  it  has 
the  same  effect  upon  him. 

Oswald.  I  hate  a  fool's  paradise ;  it's  the  thing  in 
the  world  I  most  pray  to  keep  clear  of. 

Darcy.  There  is  no  question  of  paradise — that's 
the  last  thing.  Your  folly  as  well  as  your  ecstasy 
is,  on  the  contrary,  in  your  rigid  national  conscious 
ness  ;  it's  the  extravagance  of  a  perpetual  spasm. 
What  I  go  in  for  is  a  great  reality,  and  our  making 


AN    ANIMATED    CONVERSATION  293 

it  comprehensive  and  fruitful.  Of  course  we  shall 
never  do  anything  without  imagination — by  remain 
ing  dull  and  dense  and  literal. 

Oswald.  Attrappe! 

Clifford.  What  does  Oswald  mean  ?  I  don't  un 
derstand  French. 

Oswald.  I  have  heard  you  speak  it  to-night. 

Clifford.  Then  I  don't  understand  your  pronuncia 
tion. 

Oswald.  It's  not  that  of  Stratford-at-Bow.  The 
difference  between  your  ideas  about  yourselves  and 
the  way  your  performances  strike  the  rest  of  the 
world  is  one  of  the  points  that  might  be  touched 
upon  if  it  were  not,  as  I  am  advised,  absolutely  im 
possible.  The  emanation  of  talent  and  intelligence 
from  your  conversation,  your  journals,  your  books — 

Clifford.  I  give  you  up  our  conversation,  and  even 
our  journals.  As  for  our  books,  they  are  clever 
enough  for  you  to  steal. 

Belinda.  See  what  an  immense  advantage  Clifford 
has  t 

Oswald.  I  acknowledge  it  in  advance. 

Camilla.  I  like  their  books  better  than  ours.  I 
love  a  good  English  novel. 

Oswald.  If  you  were  not  so  naive,  you  wouldn't 
dare  to  say  so  in  Paris.  Darcy  was  talking  about 
what  a  German,  what  a  Frenchman  thinks.  Parlons- 
en,  of  what  a  Frenchman  thinks  ! 

Belinda.  I  thought  you  didn't  care. 

Belwood.  He  means  thinks  of  us. 

Darcy.  An  intelligent  foreigner  might  easily  think 


294  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON    AND    ELSEWHERE 

it  is  open  to  us  to  have  the  biggest  international  life 
in  the  world. 

Oswald.  Darcy  has  formed  the  foolish  habit  of  liv 
ing  in  England,  and  it  has  settled  upon  him  so  that 
he  has  become  quite  provincialized.  I  believe  he 
really  supposes  that  that's  the  centre  of  ideas. 

Clifford,  Oh,  hang  ideas  ! 

Oswald.  Thank  you,  Clifford.  He  has  lost  all  sense 
of  proportion  and  perspective,  of  the  way  things  strike 
people  on  the  continent — on  the  continents — in  the 
clear  air  of  the  world.  He  has  forfeited  his  birth 
right. 

Darcy.  On  the  contrary,  I  have  taken  it  up,  and 
my  eye  for  perspective  has  grown  so  that  I  see  an 
immensity  where  you  seem  to  me  to  see  a  dusky  little 
cul-de-sac. 

Clifford.  Is  Paris  the  centre  of  ideas  ? 

Belinda.  I  thought  it  was  Berlin. 

Camilla.  Oh,  dear,  must  we  go  and  live  in  Berlin  ? 

Darcy.  Why  will  no  one  have  the  courage  to  say 
frankly  that  it's  New  York  ? 

Belwood.  Wouldn't  it  be  Boston,  rather  ? 

Oswald.  I  am  not  obliged  to  say  where  it  is,  and  I 
am  not  at  all  sure  that  there  is  such  a  place.  But  I 
know  very  well  where  it's  not.  There  are  places 
where  there  are  more  ideas — places  where  there  are 
fewer — and  places  where  there  are  none  at  all.  In 
Paris  there  are  many,  in  constant  circulation ;  you 
meet  them  in  periodicals,  in  books,  and  in  the  con 
versation  of  the  people.  The  people  are  not  afraid 
of  them — they  quite  like  them. 


AN    ANIMATED    CONVERSATION  295 

Belinda.  Some  of  them  are  charming,  and  one  must 
congratulate  the  people  who  like  them  on  their  taste. 

Oswald.  They  are  not  all  for  women,  and,  man 
Dieu,  you  must  take  one  with  another.  You  must 
have  all  sorts  to  have  many,  and  you  must  have 
many  to  have  a  few  good  ones. 

Clifford.  You  express  yourself  like  a  preliminary 
remark  in  a  French  etude. 

Belinda.  Clifford,  I  shall  have  to  double  that  far 
thing  ! 

Belwood.  If  the  book  at  present  is  the  novel,  the 
French  book  is  the  French  novel.  And  if  the  ideas 
are  in  the  book,  we  must  go  to  the  French  novel  for 
our  ideas. 

Clifford.  Another  preliminary  remark  —  does  any 
one  follow  ? 

Ddrcy.  We  must  go  everywhere  for  them,  and  we 
may  form  altogether,  you  and  we — that  this  our  com 
mon  mind  may  form  —  the  biggest  net  in  the  world 
for  catching  them. 

Oswald.  I  should  like  to  analyze  that  queer  mixt 
ure — our  common  mind — and  refer  the  different  in 
gredients  to  their  respective  contributors.  However, 
it  doesn't  strike  me  as  true  of  France,  and  it  is  not 
of  France  that  one  would  mean  it,  that  the  book  is 
the  novel.  Across  the  Channel  there  are  other  liv 
ing  forms.  Criticism,  for  instance,  is  alive  :  I  notice 
that  in  what  is  written  about  the  art  I  endeavor  to 
practise.  Journalism  is  alive. 

Belwood.  And  isn't  the  novel  alive  ? 

Oswald.  Oh,  yes,  there  are  ideas  in  it — there  are 
ideas  about  it. 


296  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

Darcy.  In  England,  too,  there  are  ideas  about  it ; 
there  seems  to  be  nothing  else  just  now. 

Oswald.  I  haven't  come  across  one. 

Belwood.  You  might  pass  it  without  noticing  it  — 
they  are  not  so  salient. 

Belinda.  But  I  thought  we  agreed  that  it  was  in 
England  that  it  is  the  form  ? 

Oswald.  We  didn't  agree ;  but  that  would  be 
my  impression.  In  England,  however,  even  "  the 
form  "  —  ! 

Belwood.  I  see  what  you  mean.  Even  "  the  form  " 
doesn't  carry  you  very  far.  That's  a  pretty  picture 
of  our  literature  ! 

Oswald.  I  should  like  Darcy  to  think  so. 

Darcy.  My  dear  fellow,  Darcy  thinks  a  great  many 
things,  whereas  you  appear  to  him  to  be  able  to  think 
but  one  or  two. 

Belinda.  Do  wait  till  Belwood  and  Clifford  go. 

Belwood.  We  must,  or  at  least  I  must,  in  fact,  be 
going. 

Clifford.  So  must  I,  though  there  is  a  question  I 
should  have  liked  still  to  ask  Darcy. 

Camilla.  Oh,  I'm  so  disappointed  —  I  hoped  we 
should  have  talked  about  novels.  There  seemed  a 
moment  when  we  were  near  it. 

Belinda.  We  must  do  that  yet  —  we  must  all  meet 
again. 

Camilla.  But,  my  dear,  Oswald  and  I  are  going 
to  Paris. 

Belinda.  That  needn't  prevent ;  the  rest  of  us  will 
go  over  and  see  you.  We'll  talk  of  novels  in  your  salon. 


AN    ANIMATED    CONVERSATION  297 

Camilla,  That  will  be  lovely — but  will  Clifford  and 
Belwood  come  ? 

Clifford.  Oh,  I  go  to  Paris  sometimes ;  but  not  for 
"  the  form."  Nor  even  for  the  substance  ! 

Oswald.  What  do  you  go  for  ? 

Clifford.  Oh,  just  for  the  lark  ! 

Belwood  (to  Camilla).  I  shall  go  to  see  you. 

Camilla.  You're  the  nicest  Englishman  I  ever  saw. 
And,  in  spite  of  my  husband,  I  delight  in  your 
novels. 

Oswald.  I  said  nothing  against  Belwood's.  And, 
in  general,  they  are  proper  enough  for  women  — 
especially  for  little  girls  like  you. 

Clifford  (to  Camilla).  Have  you  read  "  Mrs.  Jenks 
of  Philadelphia  "  ? 

Camilla.  Of  Philadelphia  ?    jfamais  de  la  vie ! 

Darcy  (to  Oswald}.  You  think  me  so  benighted  to 
have  a  fancy  for  London  ;  but  is  it  your  idea  that 
one  ought  to  live  in  Paris  ? 

Belwood.  Paris  is  very  well,  but  why  should  you 
people  give  yourself  away  at  such  a  rate  to  the 
French  ?  Much  they  thank  you  for  it !  They  don't 
even  know  that  you  do  it ! 

Oswald.  Darcy  is  a  man  of  letters,  and  it's  in  Paris 
that  letters  flourish. 

Belinda.   Tiens,  does  Darcy  write? 

Belwood.  He  writes,  but  before  he  writes  he  ob 
serves.  Why  should  he  observe  in  a  French  me 
dium  ? 

Oswald.  For  the  same  reason  that  I  do.  Cest 
plus  clair. 


298  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND   ELSEWHERE 

Darcy.  Oswald  has  no  feeling  of  race. 

Belwood.  On  the  contrary,  he  feels  it  as  a  French 
man.  But  why  should  you  Americans  keep  pottering 
over  French  life  and  observing  that  ?  They  them 
selves  do  nothing  else,  and  surely  they  suffice  to  the 
task.  Stick  to  our  race  —  saturate  yourself  with 
that. 

Oswald.  Do  you  mean  the  English  ? 

Darcy.  I  know  what  he  means  ! 

Oswald.  You  are  mighty  mysterious  if  you  do. 

Darcy,  I  am  of  Camilla's  opinion  —  I  think  Bel- 
wood's  the  nicest  Englishman  I  ever  saw. 

Belinda.  I  am  amused  at  the  way  it  seems  not  to 
occur  to  any  of  us  that  the  proper  place  to  observe 
our  own  people  is  in  our  own  country. 

Darcy.  Oh,  London's  the  place;  it  swarms  with 
our  own  people ! 

Oswald.  Do  you  mean  with  English  people  ?  You 
have  mixed  things  up  so  that  it's  hard  to  know  what 
you  do  mean. 

Darcy.  I  mean  with  English  people  and  with 
Americans — I  mean  with  all.  Enough  is  as  good  as 
a  feast,  and  there  are  more  Americans  there  than 
even  the  most  rapacious  observer  can  tackle. 

Belinda.  This  hotel  is  full  of  them. 

Darcy.  You  have  only  to  stand  quiet  and  every 
type  passes  by.  And  over  here  they  have  a  relief — 
it's  magnificent ! 

Belinda.  They  have  a  relief,  but  sometimes  /  have 
none !  You  must  remember,  however,  that  life  isn't 
all  observation.  It's  also  action  ;  it's  also  sympathy. 


AN    ANIMATED    CONVERSATION  299 

Darcy.  To  observe  for  a  purpose  is  action.  But 
there  are  more  even  than  one  can  sympathize  with ; 
I  am  willing  to  put  it  that  way. 

Oswald.  Rubbish — rubbish — rubbish  ! 

Belinda.  You're  rough,  Oswald. 

Oswald.  He  used  the  same  words  a  while  ago. 

Darcy.  And  then  there  are  all  the  English,  too — 
thrown  in.  Think  what  that  makes  of  London,  think 
of  the  collection,  the  compendium.  And  Oswald 
talks  of  Paris  ! 

Oswald.  The  Americans  go  to  Paris  in  hordes  — 
they  are  famous  for  it. 

Darcy.  They  used  to  be,  but  it's  not  so  now. 
They  flock  to  London. 

Oswald.  Only  the  stupid  ones. 

Darcy.  Those  are  so  many,  then,  that  they  are 
typical ;  they  must  be  watched. 

Belinda.  Go  away,  you  two  Englishmen ;  we  are 
washing  our  dirty  linen. 

Belwood.  I  go.  But  we  have  washed  ours  before 
you. 

Clifford.  I  also  take  leave,  but  I  should  like  to  put 
in  my  question  to  Darcy  first. 

Belinda.  He's  so  exalted  —  he  doesn't  hear 
you. 

Oswald.  He  sophisticates  scandalously,  in  the  in 
terest  of  a  fantastic  theory.  I  might  even  say  in  that 
of  a  personal  preference. 

Darcy.  Oh,  don't  speak  of  my  personal  preferences 
— you'll  never  get  to  the  bottom  of  them  ! 

Oswald  (to  Camilla).  Ain't  he  mysterious  ? 


300  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

Belinda.  I  have  an  idea  he  hasn't  any  personal 
preferences.  Those  are  primitive  things. 

Camilla.  Well,  we  have  them  —  over  there  in  the 
Avenue  Marceau.  So  we  can't  cast  the  first  stone. 
I  am  rather  ashamed,  before  these  gentlemen.  We're 
a  bad  lot,  we  four. 

Clifford.  Yes,  you're  a  bad  lot.  That's  why  I  pre 
fer  "  Mrs.  Jenks."  Can't  any  of  you  stand  it,  over 
there  ? 

Belinda.  I  am  going  home  next  year,  to  remain 
forever. 

Belwood.  Then  Clifford  and  I  will  come  over — so 
it  will  amount  to  the  same  thing. 

Darcy.  Those  are  details,  and  whatever  we  do  or 
don't  do,  it  will  amount  to  the  same  thing.  For  we 
are  weaving  our  work  together,  and  it  goes  on  for 
ever,  and  it's  all  one  mighty  loom.  And  we  are  all 
the  shuttles — Belinda  and  Camilla,  Belwood,  Clifford, 
Oswald,  and  Darcy  —  directed  by  the  master-hand. 
We  fly  to  and  fro,  in  our  complicated,  predestined 
activity,  and  it  matters  very  little  where  we  are  at  a 
particular  moment.  We  are  all  of  us  here,  there,  and 
everywhere,  wherever  the  threads  are  crossed.  And 
the  tissue  grows  and  grows,  and  we  weave  into  it  all 
our  lights  and  our  darkness,  all  our  quarrels  and  rec 
onciliations,  all  our  stupidities  and  our  strivings,  all 
the  friction  of  our  intercourse,  and  all  the  elements 
of  our  fate.  The  tangle  may  seem  great  at  times, 
but  it  is  all  an  immeasurable  pattern,  a  spreading, 
many-colored  figure.  And  the  figure,  when  it  is  fin 
ished,  will  be  a  magnificent  harmony. 


AN    ANIMATED  CONVERSATION  301 

Oswald.  He  is  exalted  ! 

Camilla.   C'est  tres-joli. 

Belinda.  If  I'm  only  an  unconscious,  irresponsible 
shuttle,  and  it  doesn't  matter  where  I  am,  I  think  I 
won't,  after  all,  go  home. 

Darcy.  I  don't  care  where  you  go.  The  world  is 
ours ! 

Clifford.  Yes,  our  common  mind  is  to  swallow  it 
up.  But  what  about  our  common  language  ? 

Belinda.  This  is  Clifford's  great  question. 

Darcy.  How  do  you  mean,  what  about  it  ? 

Clifford.  Do  you  expect  Belwood  and  me  to  learn 
American  ? 

Belwood.  It  is  a  great  question. 

Darcy.  Yes,  if  you  like. 

Clifford.  Will  it  be  obligatory  ? 

Darcy.  Oh,  no,  quite  optional. 

Oswald.  What  do  you  mean  by  American  ? 

Clifford.  I  mean  your  language.  (To  Darcy.}  You 
consider  that  you  will  continue  to  understand  ours? 

Belinda.  The  upper  classes,  yes. 

Camilla.  My  dear,  there  will  be  no  upper  classes 
when  we  are  all  little  drudging  bobbins  ! 

Belinda.  Oh,  yes,  there'll  be  the  bobbins  for  silk 
and  the  bobbins  for  wool. 

Camilla.  And  I  suppose  the  silk  will  be  English. 

Oswald  (to  Clifford}.  What  do  you  mean  by  my 
language  ? 

Clifford.  I  mean  American. 

Oswald.  Haven't  we  a  right  to  have  a  language  of 
our  own  ? 


302  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

Darcy.  It  was  inevitable. 

Clifford  (to  Oswald}.  I  don't  understand  you. 

Belinda.  Already  ? 

Clifford.  I  mean  that  Oswald  seems  at  once  to  re 
sent  the  imputation  that  you  have  a  national  tongue 
and  to  wish  to  insist  on  the  fact  that  you  have  it. 
His  position  is  not  clear. 

Darcy.  That  is  partly  because  our  tongue  itself  is 
not  clear  as  yet.  We  must  hope  that  it  will  be  clearer. 
Oswald  needn't  resent  anything,  for  the  evolution  was 
inevitable.  A  body  of  English  people  crossed  the 
Atlantic  and  sat  down  in  a  new  climate  on  a  new  soil, 
amid  new  circumstances.  It  was  a  new  heaven  and  a 
new  earth.  They  invented  new  institutions,  they  en 
countered  different  needs.  They  developed  a  partic 
ular  physique,  as  people  do  in  a  particular  medium, 
and  they  began  to  speak  in  a  new  voice.  They  went 
in  for  democracy,  and  that  alone  would  affect — it  has 
affected — the  tone  immensely.  C'est  bien  le  moins  (do 
you  follow  ?)  that  that  tone  should  have  had  its  range 
and  that  the  language  they  brought  over  with  them 
should  have  become  different  to  express  different 
things.  A  language  is  a  very  sensitive  organism.  It 
must  be  convenient — it  must  be  handy.  It  serves,  it 
obeys,  it  accommodates  itself. 

Clifford.  Ours,  on  your  side  of  the  water,  has  cer 
tainly  been  very  accommodating. 

Darcy.  It  has  struck  out  different  notes. 

Clifford.  He  talks  as  if  it  were  music  ! 

Belinda.  I  like  that  idea  of  our  voice  being  new ; 
do  you  mean  it  creaks  ?  I  listen  to  Darcy  with  a  cer- 


AN    ANIMATED    CONVERSATION  303 

tain  surprise,  however,  for  I  am  bound  to  say  I  have 
heard  him  criticise  the  American  idiom. 

Darcy.  You  have  heard  me  criticise  it  as  neglect 
ed,  as  unstudied  :  you  have  never  heard  me  criticise 
it  as  American.  The  fault  I  find  with  it  is  that  it's 
irresponsible — it  isn't  American  enough. 

Clifford.   C^est  trap  fort! 

Darcy.  It's  the  candid  truth.  I  repeat,  its  diver 
gence  was  inevitable.  But  it  has  grown  up  roughly, 
and  we  haven't  had  time  to  cultivate  it.  That  is  all 
I  complain  of,  and  it's  awkward  for  us,  for  surely  the 
language  of  such  a  country  ought  to  be  magnificent. 
That  is  one  of  the  reasons  why  I  say  that  it  won't  be 
obligatory  upon  you  English  to  learn  it.  We  haven't 
quite  learned  it  ourselves.  When  we  shall  at  last 
have  mastered  it  we'll  talk  the  matter  over  with  you. 
We'll  agree  upon  our  signs. 

Camilla.  Do  you  mean  we  must  study  it  in  books  ? 

Darcy.  I  don't  care  how  —  or  from  the  lips  of  the 
pretty  ladies. 

Belinda.  I  must  bravely  concede  that  often  the 
lips  of  the  pretty  ladies — 

Darcy  (interrupting).  At  any  rate,  it's  always  Amer 
ican  . 

Camilla.  But  American  improved  —  that's  simply 
English. 

Clifford.  Your  husband  will  tell  you  it's  simply 
French. 

Darcy.  If  it's  simply  English,  that  perhaps  is  what 
was  to  be  demonstrated.  Extremes  meet ! 

Belwood.  You  have  the  drawback  (and  I  think  it  a 


304  ESSAYS    IN    LONDON   AND    ELSEWHERE 

great  disadvantage)  that  you  come  so  late,  that  you 
have  not  fallen  on  a  language-making  age.  The  peo 
ple  who  first  started  our  vocabularies  were  very  na'ifs. 

Darcy.  Oh,  we  are  very  na'ifs. 

Bclwood.  When  I  listen  to  Darcy  I  find  it  hard  to 
believe  it. 

Oswald.  Don't  listen  to  him. 

Belwood.  The  first  words  must  have  been  rather 
vulgar. 

Belinda.  Or  perhaps  pathetic. 

Belwood.  New  signs  are  crude,  and  you,  in  this 
matter,  are  in  the  crude,  the  vulgar  stage. 

Darcy.  That  no  doubt  is  our  misfortune. 

Belinda.  That's  what  I  mean  by  the  pathos  ! 

Darcy.  But  we  have  always  the  resource  of  Eng 
lish.  We  have  lots  of  opportunity  to  practise  it. 

Clifford.  As  a  foreign  tongue,  yes. 

Darcy.  To  speak  it  as  the  Russians  speak  French. 

Belwood.  Oh,  you'll  grow  very  fond  of  it. 

Clifford.  The  Russians  are  giving  up  French. 

Darcy.  Yes,  but  they've,  got  the  language  of  Tol 
stoi'. 

Clifford  (groaning).  Oh,  heavens,  Tolstoi! 

Darcy.  Our  great  writers  have  written  in  English. 
That's  what  I  mean  by  American  having  been  neg 
lected. 

Clifford.  If  you  mean  ours,  of  course. 

Darcy.  I  mean — yours — ours — yes  ! 

Oswald.  It  isn't  a  harmony.     It's  a  labyrinth. 

Clifford.  It  plays  an  odd  part  in  Darcy's  harmony, 
this  duality  of  tongues. 


AN    ANIMATED    CONVERSATION  305 

Darcy.  It   plays   the   part   of   amusement.      What 
could  be  more  useful  ? 

Clifford.  Ah,  then,  we  may  laugh  at  you  ? 

Darcy.  It  will  make  against  tameness. 

Oswald.  Camilla,  come  away ! 

Clifford.  Especially  if  you  get  angry. 

Belinda.  No,  you  and  Belwood  go  first.    We  Amer 
icans  must  stay  to  pray. 

Camilla  (to  Clifford},  Well,  mind  you  come  to  Paris. 

Clifford.  Will  your  husband  receive  me  ? 

Oswald.  Oh,  in  Paris  I'm  all  right. 

Belinda.  I'll  bring  every  one. 

Clifford  ( to   Camilla  ).      Try  "  Mrs.  Gibbs  of  Ne 
braska,"  the  companion-piece  to  "  Mrs.  Jenks." 

Oswald.  That's  another  one  you  stole  ! 

Belwood.  Ah,  the  French  and  Germans ! 

Belinda  {pushing  him  out  with    Clifford}.  Go,  go. 
(To  the  others?)  Let  us  pray. 

1889. 


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in'the  century.  Their  author  was  a  man  of  rare  culture,  of  keen 
observation,  and  of  polished  wit. — Observer,  N.  Y. 

The  most  delightful  book  of  an  autobiographical  character  that 
has  been  published  in  this  country  for  many  years. — JV.  Y.  Sun. 

An  honor  to  literature,  and  to  American  literature  especially. 
They  give  us  the  more  intimate  history  of  a  man  of  genius,  a 
great  writer,  and  a  man  of  the  world. — N.  Y.  Tribune. 


Published  by  HARPER  &  BROTHERS,New  York. 


or  tale  by  all  booksellers,  or  will  be  sent  by  mail,  postage  Prepaid  by 
the  publishers,  to  any  part  of  the  United  States,  Canada,  or  Mexico,  on  receipt 
of  the  price. 


BOSWELL'S  JOHNSON. 


BOSWELL'S  LIFE  OF  JOHNSON,  including  Boswell's 
Journal  of  a  Tour  to  the  Hebrides,  and  Johnson's  Diary 
of  a  Journey  into  North  Wales.  Edited  by  GEORGE 
BIRKBECK  HILL,  D.C.L.,  Pembroke  College,  Oxford. 
Edition  de  Luxe.  In  Six  Volumes.  Large  8vo,  Leather, 
with  Cloth  Sides,  Uncut  Edges  and  Gilt  Tops,  with  many 
Portraits,  Views,  Fac-similes,  etc.,  $30  oo.  (///  a  Box.} 

Popular  Edition.     Six  Volumes.     Cloth,  Uncut  Edges 
and  Gilt  Tops,  $10  oo. 

This  great  work  has  now  reached  a  form  which  may  be  con 
sidered  definitive  and  final.  .  .  .Is  in  every  way  the  best  edition 
ever  published. — IV.  Y.  Mail  and  Express. 

Dr.  Birkbeck  Hill's  edition  of  Boswell  may  perhaps  be  re 
garded  as  the  most  scholarly,  painstaking,  liberal-minded,  fair, 
and  complete  that  has  yet  been  published.  It  is  honest  work 
throughout,  and  careful  and  loving  work,  and  it  is  informed  by  a 
sanity  and  ripeness  of  judgment,  and  illustrated  by  an  extent  of 
information  which  must  place  and  keep  it  in  the  front  rank. — 
N.  Y.  Tribune. 

The  best  edition  of  "  Boswell's  Life  of  Johnson  "  yet  issued  in 
America,  and  one  excellent,  choice,  and  individual  among  all  the 
editions. — Independent,  N.  Y. 

Many  are  the  merits  of  this  interesting  and  accurate  edition  of 
Boswell's  Life. — Philadelphia  Ledger. 

The  student  of  the  period,  and  the  reader  who  has  loved  his 
Boswell  with  a  life-long  love,  will  thoroughly  enjoy  the  intellect 
ual  treat  provided  for  them  by  the  editor  of  this  beautiful  edition. 
— Spectator,  London. 

Altogether  this  edition  is  one  to  warm  the  cockles  of  the  heart 
of  both  bibliophile  and  literature-lover. — Hartford  Courant. 

That  this  edition  is  the  best  goes  without  saying,  and  that  it 
is  a  monument  of  labor  will  astonish  no  one  who  reflects  that 
eighteen  years  have  been  required  to  produce  it.  A  more  com 
petent  editor  than  Mr.  Hill  cannot  be  imagined. — Literary  World, 
London.  

Published  by  HARPER  &  BROTHERS,NewYork. 

HEJr"  For  sale  by  all  booksellers,  or  -will  be  sent  by  mail,  postage  prepaid  by 
the  publishers,  to  any  part  of  tlie  United  States,  Canada,  or  Mexico,  on  receipt 
of  the  price. 


SCOTT'S  JOURNAL. 


THE  JOURNAL  OF  SIR  WALTER  SCOTT,  1825- 
1832,  from  the  Original  Manuscript  at  Abbots- 
ford.  With  Two  Portraits  and  Engraved  Title- 
pages.  Two  Volumes.  8vo,  Cloth,  Uncut 
Edges  and  Gilt  Tops,  $7  50.  (/;/  a  Box) 

Popular  Edition.     One  Volume.     8vo,  Cloth, 
$2  50. 

Full  of  interesting  glimpses  into  the  great  author's  mind,  and 
reveals  in  a  striking  manner  the  inextinguishable  buoyancy  with 
which  he  encountered  misfortune,  the  iron  perseverance  with 
which  he  set  himself  to  clear  away  the  mountain  of  debt  with 
which  he  found  himself  burdened  when  his  best  years  had  passed, 
the  keen  sense  of  honor  and  duty  which  marked  even  his  most 
private  communings  with  himself,  and  the  gay  humor  which 
characterized  him  whenever  the  clouds  parted  for  a  moment  and 
permitted  the  sunshine  to  pass.  ...  It  is  indeed  a  valuable  con 
tribution  to  our  knowledge  of  Sir  Walter  Scott. — N.  Y.  Tribune. 

A  piece  of  transparent  simplicity,  free  from  moralizing  and 
free  from  attitudes,  in  which  Scott  shows  his  heart  and  writes 
down  his  thoughts,  experiences,  and  personal  records. — Inde 
pendent,  N.  Y. 

Mr.  Douglas  is  a  conscientious  and  competent  editor,  and  he 
has  supplied  all  the  notes  which  are  required  for  elucidating  the 
text  without  making  a  parade  of  superfluous  learning.  .  .  .  This 
final  work  by  Sir  Walter  Scott  is  as  instructive  and  welcome  as 
any  which  he  penned. — Athcnccum,  London. 

A  better  tempered,  less  morbid  diary  never  was  published.  .  .  . 
No  extracts  can  do  justice  to  the  book  as  a  whole — to  the  manly, 
cheerful,  tender  spirit  of  the  man. — N.  Y.  Herald. 

This  is  such  a  book  as  the  world  has  not  often  seen.  These 
two  impressive  volumes  contain  one  of  the  most  effective  pictures 
of  a  really  strong  man,  painted  as  only  that  man  himself  could 
have  painted  it,  which  the  English  language  contains.  .  .  .  This 
book  is  one  of  the  greatest  gifts  which  our  English  literature  has 
ever  received. — Spectator,  London. 


Published  by  HARPER  &  BROTHERS,NewYork. 


or  sale  by  all  booksellers,  or  "will  be  sent  by  mail,  postage  prepaid 
by  the  publishers,  to  any  part  of  the  United  States,  Canada,  or  Mexico,  on 
receipt  of  the  price. 


TTRttARY.  LOS  ANGELES 


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